In a multiplex in Cartagena, Colombia, a screening of the latest Spider-Man blockbuster unspooled into chaos for reasons no studio executive could have scripted. A single, overpowering flatulence – or, as some local media later speculated, a prankster’s ‘fart bomb’ – sent a wave of disgust through the auditorium. One by one, then in a rush, around a hundred cinemagoers fled for the exits, among them a man who had arrived dressed as the web-slinger himself. The projection rolled on, but almost nobody returned; the film played out to what one report called a phantom audience.

That surreal episode is a footnote to the commercial story of ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’, which by early August had swung past $1.15bn in worldwide ticket sales and become the highest-grossing film of 2026. It crossed the billion-dollar mark in six days – a pace bettered only by ‘Avengers: Endgame’ – and in India it knocked the war epic ‘Border 2’ out of second place with a gross of over Rs 400 crore. Yet even as the Tom Holland vehicle rewrote box-office ledgers, a very different kind of momentum was building around it: a coordinated boycott campaign that has rippled from Arabic-language social media into activist circles in the United States and Europe.

The boycott targets not the film’s cast or its story, but the presence among its producers of Avi Arad, a figure whom campaigners describe as a vocal supporter of Israel and of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. Organisers, including the Palestinian journalist and filmmaker Bisan Ouda, argue that every ticket bought represents a financial contribution to a work involving someone who holds those political positions. “The boycott represents a means of cultural and economic pressure,” read posts shared widely on platforms in Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia and beyond, framing the refusal to watch as a moral stance consistent with broader global boycott movements.

In Lebanon, activists explicitly linked Arad’s Israeli nationality to a rejection of screening works involving Israelis inside the country. The campaign’s organisers insist the issue is not the fictional hero or the artistic content, but the identity and public advocacy of one of the film’s key producers. Their call has been amplified by pro-Palestinian networks in the West, where some see cultural boycotts as an extension of economic and academic ones, a way to signal to studios that the political profiles of their collaborators now form part of the audience’s calculus.

Back in that Cartagena cinema, the evacuation was a fleeting, absurdist rupture – a room emptied by a bodily mishap, the screen still flickering with a hero who, on paper, can outrun anything. The boycott, by contrast, is a slow, deliberate emptying, an attempt to drain a blockbuster of its moral legitimacy one unsold ticket at a time. Whether either leaves a lasting mark on a franchise that has already banked over a billion dollars remains an open question, but for a moment, in a Colombian shopping centre, the only audience for Spider-Man was the dark.