Viral Hand-Drawn ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Theater Poster Removed by Head Office — Now the Creator Plans to Sell Copies

Sometimes the most talked-about piece of art tied to a blockbuster isn’t the official marketing at all. That was the case for one small Canadian theater this month, where a scrappy, hand-drawn placeholder ended up generating more buzz than the studio-approved posters ever could.

The story started at a Famous Players 6 location in Prince George, British Columbia, where staff found themselves without any of the official promotional materials for the theater’s biggest release of the summer. Rather than leave an empty display case, one employee decided to take matters into his own hands.

Nineteen-year-old Drake Landon, the theater’s resident artist, was asked by his manager to sketch a mock-up poster to fill the gap left by the missing ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘ materials. What he produced instead became a viral sensation that ended up drawing both fan love and corporate pushback.

Landon’s manager specifically asked him to draw Spooder-Man, the crudely rendered, MS Paint-style Spider-Man meme that first circulated online around 2012, rather than a straightforward rendition of the actual character. Landon initially offered to draw the real Spider-Man instead, but ultimately leaned into the joke and produced a hand-drawn take on Spooder-Man styled after the film’s Brand New Day redesign.

Beneath the illustration, Landon added a handwritten note reading, “Sorry! We never recieved the real posters! Sorry for any inconviniences!” misspellings included, which only added to its charm once photos started spreading online. A moviegoer who spotted the poster during a visit to the theater photographed Landon standing beside his creation and shared it in local Facebook groups, setting off the viral chain reaction that followed.

From there, the image spread rapidly across Reddit, including the Marvel Studios subreddit, where it racked up tens of thousands of upvotes, along with widespread shares across entertainment and movie news pages. Landon told CBC News that he tried to stay true to the character’s newer Brand New Day design while still capturing the meme’s signature crude style.

So, the spooder man poster needed to be taken down…sadly.
by u/Single_Storm9743 in marvelstudios

The poster’s popularity even reached Cineplex’s corporate offices, where Michelle Saba, the company’s VP of communications, praised the effort directly. Saba said the team simply had a little fun while waiting for their official ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ poster to arrive, a comment she shared with The Hollywood Reporter.

That goodwill didn’t stop the poster from eventually being pulled from display. Landon explained that his manager told him “head office called and asked for it to be taken down,” reportedly to avoid any issue with the studio over unofficial use of the character and film branding.

Landon, who initially stayed anonymous online out of concern he might be accused of faking the story, eventually came forward on Reddit to confirm he was the artist behind the drawing. He has since said he plans to create and print a limited run of copies or redrawn duplicates for fans who have been asking to buy their own version.

For a movie already smashing box office records as the longest Spider-Man film ever made, it’s a fittingly offbeat footnote that a marker sketch meant to last a single shift ended up outshining the professional marketing campaign, at least for one corner of the internet. Landon, for his part, has said he mostly prefers drawing robots and machines in his spare time, making this brush with viral fame something of an accident.

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