BMW Just Started Playing Spider-Man Ads on the Dashboards of $160,000 Cars When Owners Start Them Up

The ads are everywhere!!!!!!

The Spider-Man: Brand New Day banner pops up the moment the car starts, and owners have to click through it before the screen fully lets them in. BMW’s own press release called the video “a special surprise” for drivers. The promotion runs through Aug. 10 as a partnership with Sony-Marvel.

Reddit’s r/BMW forum lit up with reactions: “Insanely dystopian,” “This needs to be made illegal before everyone starts doing it,” “$130K to get a Spider-Man commercial,” and “Fuck everything about this.”

One owner traced the slow creep. BMW “started off with mostly just celebratory videos, which slowly became ads about their own products, and now they feel confident enough to move on to third-party ads,” they wrote, adding that with the screen running nearly every function, “you’re essentially forced to watch the ad before you can interact with your own property.”

Several commenters compared it to Apple’s 2014 stunt of dropping a U2 album into more than half a billion iTunes libraries. The irony runs both ways: in the film, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man ends up in a civilian’s BMW and the driver flips on Sport Mode.

The company said it wouldn’t do this. In December 2023, a BMW senior vice president told an industry roundtable: “To say I’m selling the screen to play a commercial, I don’t see it. It’s a private space.” A spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the backlash.

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