Spider-Man: Brand New Day released in Indian theatres on July 30, 2026, and its India-specific marketing campaign, built around cricketers KL Rahul and Suryakumar Yadav, turned the film’s own plot into the ad strategy itself.
Here’s the setup: in Brand New Day, Peter Parker exists in a world that remembers Spider-Man but has completely forgotten who Peter Parker is. Sony Pictures India didn’t market around that premise. They built two ad films directly on top of it, using two of India’s most recognisable cricketers to prove the point in real life.
KL Rahul’s ad film opens on what looks like a routine press conference. Then it turns strange: journalists fail to recognise him, dismiss him when he tries to identify himself, and security is eventually called to escort him out. At the height of the absurdity, Spider-Man swings in to rescue him.
Rahul later spoke about why the campaign mattered to him personally. Now a father, he said he’s looking forward to the day his daughter is old enough to watch a Spider-Man film with him, the same way the character shaped his own childhood.
Suryakumar Yadav’s campaign followed the same premise from a different angle: the explosive batter everyone recognises on a cricket ground, reimagined in a world where nobody recognises him as himself.
Neither ad is a celebrity cameo bolted onto a trailer. Both are the film’s actual theme, handed to two real people whose public lives already sit inside that exact tension.
Lionel Messi appears in a separate spot for the film, entering a coffee shop and meeting Tom Holland’s Peter Parker before Parker steps away and returns as Spider-Man for a web-slinging tour together. It’s a global-facing ad, but the same logic applies in India: Messi’s fame here is enormous and entirely one-directional, everyone knows him, almost no one has ever actually met him.
None of these three ads needed to explain Brand New Day’s premise in a voiceover. They just found real people whose everyday lives already illustrated it.
At Powered by Fandom, we think about campaigns like this one constantly, not because of the budget, but because of the mechanism. The film’s marketing wasn’t selling “go watch this movie.” It was saying “here’s a feeling you already know,” and then handing that feeling to people the audience already trusts.
That’s the same principle behind every merch drop, pop-up, and fan experience and the merchandise we build: find the emotional shorthand a fandom already understands, and give it a shape people can hold, wear, or watch play out.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day didn’t invent a new feeling for its India campaign. It found one that was already sitting inside two cricketers’ careers, and let the film’s own theme do the introduction.
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