BMW Puts Spider-Man Movie Ads on Dashboard Screens, Owners of $130,000 Cars Push Back

BMW has started showing advertisements for the movie Spider-Man: Brand New Day directly on the dashboard screens of its newer vehicles. Drivers start the car, and a promotional banner for the film pops up before they get to the actual controls.

The Hollywood Reporter reports the campaign began last week and is part of a paid partnership between BMW and Sony-Marvel. According to BMW's own press release, the promotion is scheduled to run through August 10.

Owners are not happy. Some of these vehicles cost up to $160,000, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and buyers say they didn't sign up to watch commercials on a screen they paid for.

The backlash has been loudest on Reddit's r/BMW forum, where users called the move "insanely dystopian" and demanded regulation to stop the practice from spreading across the auto industry. One user said they spent $130,000 on a car only to get served movie trailers. Multiple posters compared it to Black Mirror.

One owner laid out the pattern in detail: BMW started with celebratory videos on the dashboard, moved to ads for its own products, and has now graduated to third-party advertising for a Marvel movie. Because the touchscreen controls nearly every function in the car, drivers say they're effectively forced to look at an ad before they can even change a setting or start navigation. Users do have to click on the banner to play the full video, but the promotional graphic itself appears without being asked for.

This isn't a small reversal for BMW. TechSpot reported that in December 2023, a senior BMW vice president said at an industry roundtable that the company had no plans to sell dashboard screen space for advertising, framing the car's interior as personal space, not ad inventory. That position didn't last two years.

The movie tie-in goes further than the dashboard. In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Tom Holland's character drives a BMW and the film shows him engaging the car's Sport Mode, standard product placement of the kind Aston Martin has done for decades with James Bond or Chevrolet has done with Transformers.

The difference owners are objecting to isn't the movie placement. Product placement inside a film is old news and nobody's complaining about that. What's different is the direction being reversed. Instead of a car showing up in a movie, the movie is showing up inside a car people already own and paid for. That's a different transaction. Nobody consented to a rolling billboard when they signed the loan.

Several commenters online drew a comparison to Apple's 2014 decision to automatically push a U2 album onto the iTunes libraries of more than 500 million customers without asking. That stunt generated so much anger Apple built a tool specifically to let people delete the album. Both cases involve a company using its platform to shove unwanted content onto customers' personal devices, then acting surprised when people are furious about it.

There's a reasonable counterargument here worth stating plainly. BMW owns the software platform, the ad is optional to click through, and infotainment systems get updated all the time with new features some people like and some don't. Automakers increasingly treat dashboard software as a revenue stream, not just a control panel, and BMW is hardly alone in exploring subscription features and paid software unlocks for functions the hardware already supports. From a purely contractual standpoint, nothing here appears illegal. Nobody is being charged money for the ad itself, and BMW isn't claiming otherwise.

But contractual isn't the same as expected. Buyers were told, on the record, by a BMW executive that this wouldn't happen. It happened anyway, less than three years later.

BMW has not issued a public response addressing the specific owner complaints. The Spider-Man promotion is set to run through August 10, according to BMW's press release, meaning the ads should stop appearing on their own within days. Whether BMW treats this as a one-off tied to a single movie release, or a template it plans to repeat with future studio partners, is the open question owners are now watching closely.