Sony’s Tom Rothman Hopes It Will Be A ‘Brand New Day’ For ‘Spider-Man’ As Studio Launches Major Best Picture Oscar Campaign: “Are You Telling Me There Are 10 Films Better Than This One?”

EXCLUSIVE: Watch out Oscar. Spider-Man is aiming to get your attention.

Sony Pictures and Marvel‘s Spider-Man: Brand New Day is about to launch an all-out campaign to land a spot in the Best Picture race at the 99th annual Academy Awards. Can the highest-grossing movie of not just this year but all time at the domestic box office (now just shy of $41 million to become the first billion-dollar grossing movie domestically), land a place among the coveted 10 the Academy names as Best Picture nominees? Tom Rothman, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, thinks so and has decided to put the full weight of the studio behind the effort.

“The Academy is meant to recognize greatness. So, to be honest, I think it’s greatness. I think it’s received wisdom. If there aren’t people thinking about it, we’re gonna do what we can just to make people think about it,” Rothman told me this week. “I think it’s also incumbent upon studios who make these kinds of quality commercial films to get people to think about it, and here’s what I ask people when I walk around: ‘Are you telling me that there are 10 films this year that are better than this film?’ ”

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, , the fourth entry into the MCU Tom Holland era of Spidey movies at Sony, is at 90% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, nearly as critically acclaimed there as perceived large-scale Oscar contenders The Odyssey and Project Hail Mary which are also in the 90s ( and even some of the more arthouse-style contenders). Both of those, along with the upcoming unseen Dune: Part Three, are in Gold Derby’s projection of the current top 10 movies with best chances to land a Best Picture nomination. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is listed way down at No. 36, with a 0.46% chance of making the cut, well below The Sheep Detectives and a few notches above I Love Boosters. Pundits are basically ignoring the year’s biggest film, so we have to ask why.

Of the previous eight live-action Spider-Man films Sony has released since 2002, the only Oscar nominations they have received have been in the Visual Effects and Sound categories, the most recent nom for Visual Effects for 2001’s No Way Home. 2004’s Spider-Man 2 is the only one to actually win an Oscar, that one also for Visual Effects. On the animated front, 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won for Best Animated Feature, and its 2023 sequel was also nominated.

Not one of these 10 films has cracked the Best Picture race. Rothman feels Brand New Day can, and deserves to be the breakthrough.

“I think to be honest, it’s because there are things like Gold Derby, you know, whatever that is, that just tend to think only about the art film world, and look, I’m an art film guy. I made my bones in the art film world, I’m Mr. Searchlight, right? You know, my whole career, I love art films. But I’m a traditionalist, and I was never for expanding the number of Best Pictures from five to 10. Okay, I liked it the old way, but I believe that the very reason it was extended from five to 10 was so that the Academy would have room to recognize really quality commercial filmmaking,” he said pointing (correctly) to Christopher Nolan’s Best Picture-snubbed superhero movie The Dark Knight as the key reason.

“I think wise heads know that quality commercial filmmaking is extremely difficult, and to make a movie like this, never mind the fact that it’s the highest-grossing movie in history of America, forget that. It’s in the 90s on Rotten Tomatoes for critics, it’s in the 90s on audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s the thing: the movie’s great. I’m a biased witness, but that’s not me, that’s objective. You don’t have the results that you have, where we had people seeing the movie two and three times. You don’t do close to a billion dollars in America. But are there 10 films that are better than this film, just in pure quality? I think when you see movies like F1 and Barbie and Wicked and Bohemian Rhapsody, whatever, getting nominated, well that is the very reason that that the Academy changed to 10.”

So Sony has hired awards consultants and is making big plans. The studio plans a “robust” screening strategy starting just before Thanksgiving, including multiple FYC Q&As with filmmakers and department heads. Stars Tom Holland and Zendaya are also involved in campaigns for other 2026 contenders like The Odyssey and Dune 3 and Holland is in pre-production on a new film, so their availability going forward is not known. Rothman himself plans to host screenings and tastemaker events on both coasts.

In addition to Los Angeles and New York, there will be special screenings in London, Paris, Madrid, Copenhagen, Sydney, Rome, Mexico City, Berlin and Tokyo. And, as Deadline teased in September, the studio plans to do a big rerelease of the movie before year’s end — possibly as Deadline intimated with some unseen footage — that will also bring new attention to the film and hopefully inspire those Academy voters who have not seen the movie (and based on my conversations there are many) to see it in a theater.

“I think Academy members would be interested in this because it’s very significant from a storytelling movie. This is really the first of these kind of movies that I can think of that does not climax in a giant battle. In this movie there is no giant action sequence at the end. The climax of this movie are two young people sitting on the edge of a bed, talking to each other, and sharing their their deepest pain. This movie is melancholy in that way and beautiful,” he said. “I think people might take Spider-Man for granted, and not only that, I think they make assumptions about it. When you see the movie those assumptions are undone. It’s a very moving, quite personal film. Destin (Daniel Cretton) is a really personal filmmaker. This is the guy who made Short Term 12. That’s what I say when I encourage people to see it, you know, people of my generation. I say you may take it for granted, you may think it’s just another, but it isn’t. It’s really the first, when I think about it. I think it’s the first superhero movie that’s really a super person movie.”

To date, the only movies even remotely in the “superhero” universe to crack the Best Picture race have been 2018’s Black Panther, and 2019’s Joker, though the latter is really a drama far removed from what is expected in the genre.

So the biggest question is can Sony change the trajectory of the franchise in terms of Oscar and get the point across that the record-shattering success of this movie is for a reason? Rothman compares it to the Lord of the Rings franchise in hoping there can be recognition for a movie that has taken a known brand to, yes, a brand new day.

“The Academy members are really, really smart, and they know filmmaking,” he said. “And if they see the movie, which maybe they wouldn’t necessarily do, if they see the movie, I think they’ll recognize how extremely skillful it is, because they’ll know how hard it is to tell an intimate emotional story in that arena. But more than that, I think it’s this specific movie. It’s the work that Destin did, as I said, a true humanist director who put character and emotion first.”