Sony’s movie division just learned what happens when you post through a firestorm that your gaming division started. Maybe they should have waited until after July to announce things.
On Tuesday, the official Sony account teased “30 days” alongside a spider emoji, counting down to the July 31 theatrical release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
The post racked up over 6 million views. The problem: almost none of the top replies are about Spider-Man.
Instead, the replies are wall-to-wall rage over PlayStation’s announcement that it is ending physical disc production for all new games in January 2028.
Sony wanted a Spider-Man hype moment. It got a referendum.
PlayStation Hid From The Backlash, So Spider-Man Took The Hit
Here’s the part that makes this even better.
According to Eurogamer, Sony Interactive Entertainment deliberately pulled back from social media after the disc announcement, presumably to let the anger burn itself out.
But the corporate Sony account apparently never got the memo. It posted the movie tease right into the middle of the storm, and the backlash simply found the nearest Sony logo and unloaded on it.
The top reply, from streamer SeeReax, tells Sony to fix its PlayStation department and forget “all that Spider-Man s***.” It pulled in 48,000 likes and nearly half a million views, outperforming plenty of Sony’s own marketing.
Another reply reset the countdown entirely: “30 days for you to walk back on scrapping physical media before you lose your playerbase to Xbox. Tik-tok.”
The aggregators noticed too, with Culture Crave summing up what everyone could see: Sony tried teasing Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and all the top comments called them out for killing disc production.
Sony’s Old Pro-Disc Victory Lap Is Now Being Used Against It
The reply section reads like a greatest-hits album of every PlayStation grievance from the past 48 hours.
There’s the parody PlayStation slogan “Play By Our Limits.” There’s a mock PS6 ad interrupted by a “Cancel Your Pre-Order for PlayStation 6?” pop-up.
There’s the Simpsons “zero days without PlayStation taking a stupid decision” sign. There are photos of towering PS4 and PS5 disc collections captioned “PHYSICAL GAMES FOREVER,” plus nostalgia posts about reading a physical manual in the car on the way home from a physical store.
And then comes the knife twist: screenshots from Sony’s own 2013 “Official PlayStation Used Game Instructional Video,” the E3-era clip where Shuhei Yoshida mocked Microsoft’s digital restrictions by simply handing a disc to another executive.
Fans have re-captioned it “Throw this in the trash please.” Sony built its entire eighth-generation dominance on being the pro-ownership console. The internet kept the receipts.
The Disc Backlash Is Now Eating Spider-Man’s Marketing Push
To be clear, none of this reflects on the movie itself.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is tracking as one of the biggest releases of the summer, and a month out, a poisoned reply section probably won’t keep anyone out of theaters.
But it is a real marketing problem.
Sony Pictures and PlayStation are different divisions with different bosses. The public does not care. They see one Sony.
Every “30 days” style tease, every trailer drop, every piece of countdown content the company posts for the next month now shares a timeline with the angriest week PlayStation has had in years.
The disc decision has effectively hijacked the corporate account’s biggest movie campaign of 2026, right as the final marketing push begins.
The backlash got so loud that Domino’s, KFC, and GameStop all piled on. Now it’s eating Spider-Man’s promotional oxygen too.
Sony has 30 days to change the conversation before its biggest hero of the year walks into theaters dragging PlayStation’s mess behind him.
For everything on the film itself, see our full Spider-Man: Brand New Day coverage.
