Sony and Marvel Go After a Best Picture Oscar for Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Sony Pictures and Marvel are launching a campaign to put Spider-Man: Brand New Day in the running for Best Picture at the 99th Academy Awards. Deadline broke the news on 13 November 2026.
An awards campaign is the studio's effort to persuade members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that votes on the Oscars, to nominate a film. It usually means paid screenings, advertising and events aimed at voters, all of it run well before the ballots go out.
Tom Rothman, chairman and chief executive of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, decided to put the full weight of Sony Pictures behind the push, according to Deadline. The film is the fourth in Sony's run of Spider-Man movies starring Tom Holland.
The box office is the other big story. Deadline reports that the film is the highest-grossing movie of the year and of all time at the domestic box office, meaning the United States and Canada. It is just shy of $41 million away from becoming the first movie to pass $1 billion at that box office.
Critics have also been kind. Rotten Tomatoes, a website that collects reviews from film critics, lists the film at 90% fresh, which means 90% of the reviews it gathered were positive.
Spider-Man has a mixed history with Oscar voters. Spider-Man 2, from 2004, is the only live-action Spider-Man film to win an Oscar, taking the prize for Visual Effects. The animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, from 2018, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Neither film was ever a contender for Best Picture, the top award of the night.
That is the gap Sony and Marvel now want to close. A Best Picture nomination would be a first for a Spider-Man film. Whether voters will go along with it is a question for the nomination voting still months away.
For fans, the news means the franchise is pushing into the awards season, not just the box office. Studios rarely spend this kind of effort on a film without a plan to keep it in cinemas and in the conversation for a long stretch of the year.
