Did Sony Leak That Andrew Garfield No Way Home Blue Screen Shot Itself? The Clues Hiding in Plain Sight

Many believe Sony might have leaked the 8K blue screen shot of Andrew Garfield in Spider-Man: No Way Home themselves, and I found one piece of evidence hiding in plain sight that could be the smoking gun of this conspiracy. The shot was far too clean, and handled far too strangely, to look like any other leak we had seen before or since.

Andrew Garfield should have won an Oscar for the poker face he kept while the secret was already out. He was just transparent enough that we all knew he and Tobey Maguire would show up, and it worked out so well for the studio that the theory of a deliberate leak has never quite gone away.

No Way Home's real story in 2021 was the leaks

In August 2021, a teaser trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home released on August 23. I will always remember that date because it shared the uncanny coincidence of being the month and day marked with a heart on the calendar in WandaVision episode 1, a series that seemed to be able to read our minds in creepy ways.

No Way Home ranks as Sony's highest grossing movie of all time and the seventh highest grossing movie overall, and it arguably saved cinemas from the brink of extinction during Covid. But back then, the real story was the leaks. The biggest question on everyone's mind was whether Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were coming back, and how many photos and clips could be found to prove it. That one shot of Garfield on a blue screen set was so different from any other confirmed leak that it became a lingering mystery critical to how modern franchise movies are made and marketed. So the question for this investigation is whether studios have ever wanted leaks to happen.

Hollywood studios say leaks are unwanted, but Kevin Feige accepts them as inevitable

The answer you will get from Hollywood studios is no. The Hollywood Reporter explained how studios like Marvel have gotten aggressive with leak prevention in the work from home era, tracking data, auditing suppliers and pursuing prosecution against violators. A veteran VFX artist said he had to go through a whole training course and sign an agreement saying there would be no shoulder surfing, meaning his work area had to be in a dedicated part of the home not viewable from outside. In other words, turn that monitor away from the window in your apartment building.

In March 2023, Disney and Marvel took legal action to investigate an alleged leak of a dialogue script for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania that had been posted on Reddit, and the popular Marvel rumours subreddit r/MarvelStudiosSpoilers shut down in response.

Leaks are also something producers have begun to accept as inevitable. That Hollywood Reporter article quoted Kevin Feige while he was promoting Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, a movie whose cameos of Charles Xavier and Captain Carter had leaked ahead of release. Feige said: "you need to make sure that the experience itself works regardless of what has been spoiled or not." These are the words of a studio head who knows it is impossible to maintain complete secrecy, especially when your cinematic universe is populated with goofballs.

Mark Ruffalo and Tom Holland became Marvel's biggest leak headaches

There was the infamous moment in July 2017 when Mark Ruffalo leaked the ending of Avengers: Infinity War in an interview, saying that like every other Marvel movie it does not end well for the superheroes. Ruffalo also accidentally broadcast the first 10 minutes of Thor: Ragnarok on Instagram Live at an advance screening when he forgot to close the app.

Other than Ruffalo, Marvel's biggest headache when it comes to leaks has been Tom Holland. While promoting Spider-Man: Homecoming, the young Holland slipped in an interview that a trilogy of MCU Spider-Man films had been greenlit. Then in April 2018, on the opening night of Infinity War, Holland joined the Russo brothers and Kevin Feige in front of a full audience at the ArcLight Cinerama Dome in Hollywood before the movie began and addressed the crowd.

Fun fact: my lead editor Devin and I were seeing Infinity War that night in the same building. In fairness to Holland, cast and crew are often ushered in and out of LA area screenings and can get a little disoriented, but they almost never appear after a screening, because the audience would have begun to filter out and it would be hard for theatre staff to usher VIPs in discreetly.

Marvel and Sony turned Holland's big mouth into a marketing tool

After this point, Marvel and Sony began to embrace Tom Holland's big mouth and intentionally marketed announcements in a way that seemed like Holland was leaking them, when really it was part of their plan. When he announced the title of the sequel, Far From Home, on a tablet he was holding on his personal Instagram, that was clearly something they wanted him to do.

Then, in the title announcement for the third film in February 2021, they totally played into this in a similar way, with fake names and jokes about Holland spoiling things. Which brings us to summer 2021, when speculation, gossip and unconfirmed reports that Maguire and Garfield were going to appear in No Way Home had reached a fever pitch.

I saw the leaked No Way Home trailer, and it carried a VFX company watermark

The first teaser was set to release on August 23. Maguire and Garfield obviously were not in it, but the day before, an unfinished version of the trailer leaked. I have never admitted this publicly before, but my team was contacted by someone in possession of this leak. I was not in personal contact with this source, and I do not know who it was or how they got it, but I did end up seeing it, and it had the watermark of a major VFX company on it. I will not name them.

Oddly, in that unfinished version, in the shot of Peter Parker swinging through Times Square with MJ, there was a billboard for X-Men on the left side of the frame. It was clearly a placeholder meant to be swapped out, but it was there, and it was very weird. The studios took this very seriously, and Sony and Disney pushed to remove the leaked trailer from its online sources.

That was one of many leaks in the months before release. Some were innocent interview moments, like Garfield comparing himself to someone in a game of werewolf or Mafia insisting he is not the werewolf while everyone says he is. This came after a Postmates delivery person in Atlanta claimed to have delivered food to Andrew Garfield, which later turned out to be true.

The 8K Andrew Garfield shot looked nothing like a normal leak

Garfield's statements plus the August trailer leak set off a chain reaction. In early September 2021, another leak showed a blurry photo of Garfield and Maguire in Spider-Man suits on scaffolding on a blue screen set. Boom, smoking gun.

Then something really weird happened almost immediately after. 8K footage hit the internet, posted to YouTube by an account that has since removed it, but I am telling you it was up for weeks. It was only a few seconds long, but it was clearly Garfield in that same position, and it was way higher quality than anyone had ever seen for a major film leak.

Shortly after, a TikTok and YouTube editor claimed he had deepfaked the 8K shot, and for about a 24 hour period many people believed him, then he revealed that he had faked the fake and showed his process. So the original 8K shot was apparently real, or not. We were back to questioning who posted it and why.

Sony left the clip up and cleared Garfield to call it a Photoshop

After several weeks, the clip stayed online collecting millions of views, when Sony had moved so quickly to take down a leaked version of a trailer. One could argue that taking any action at that point would confirm the Garfield shot was legitimate and spoil his involvement.

But on September 13, 2021, Garfield went on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon asked him about the leak, and Garfield was allowed to respond. He said it was a Photoshop. I can tell you, having worked on a daily network talk show for five years, all questions and answers for these interview segments are firmly agreed upon ahead of time in pre-interviews that include the talent's publicist. There is no way Fallon would have been able to ask him that unless Sony and Garfield's publicist signed off on it.

In the weeks that followed, more clues arrived, including a Brazilian version of a November trailer in which the Lizard recoils, reacting to something invisible, with Garfield clearly VFX scrubbed out. I spotted a few other moments where it looks like they were scrubbed out too. Then in December 2021 the film released, and that leaked 8K shot of Garfield did appear in the movie.

A missing watermark points to someone in house

Several months later, Corridor Crew asked Kelly Port, a VFX artist who worked on No Way Home, what happened. He said visual effects teams are huge and "often the leaks don't necessarily come from visual effects in this case I think they did or an outsourced vendor I think is where it really came from." Port explained the biggest incentive for artists not to leak is that they would lose their jobs and become essentially blacklisted. He added that when Marvel or Sony sends a sequence to a VFX studio, called a turnover, your name is watermarked across the whole thing as preventative medicine.

He is absolutely right that watermarking is common practice, which is why it was so weird that the 8K blue screen shot was released with no watermark. This is not shoulder surfing like other leaks tend to be. It is not blurry, and it is not someone taking a picture of their roommate's computer screen. My articles have pointed out that most leaks tend to come from friends, family and roommates who share a picture and then panic when it goes public.

That is not what this was. If the shot had been outsourced to a VFX team or a colourist, it would have been watermarked like all other turnovers. This was someone in house with original high definition dailies from the set, and it was timed immediately after the shoulder surfing style image of Tobey and Andrew had leaked.

Sony's 2014 hack and a No Way Home joke about NBD

Sony, more than any other studio, has danced with the devil when it comes to leaks, and most of the time it has been the victim. In November 2014, Sony was hacked by a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace, targeting the comedy The Interview, which mocked North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. WikiLeaks went on to publish over 30,000 documents of internal Sony communications, and journalists at the time debated the ethics of publishing them.

Among the juiciest tidbits were Sony's Spider-Man plans, including details of Amy Pascal's April 2014 meetings with Kevin Feige about rebooting Spider-Man in the MCU in Captain America: Civil War and recasting Andrew Garfield. Also leaked were controversial character traits Sony had apparently agreed to in a 2011 contract, dictating that Spider-Man must be heterosexual, white, not abuse drugs or alcohol and more. Sony got a lot of heat for this, and it is not clear if it still holds itself to these standards, given the versions of Spider-Man in the animated Spider-Verse films.

A funnier detail had one executive writing to Pascal about The Amazing Spider-Man 2 that millennials post NBD, "as in no big deal", after extreme exercise, "wondering if Spidey could get into that in some way." I never caught this before, but No Way Home has a subtle joke where "no big deal" is said twice, with a pause from Tom and Tobey. It is hard not to see it as a nod to the NBD bit. Whoever pitched that joke, the leaks must have been on their mind.

The case for Sony, and why it stays circumstantial

To recap: the shot was super high quality and not watermarked, so it had not been handed outside the studio. Sony did not rush to take it down and okayed Garfield to talk about it. Between Tom Holland and the 2014 hack, Sony had begun to embrace online leak culture, and No Way Home became its highest grossing film thanks largely to cameos people knew would be in it and had to go see despite how scary Covid was. Coming back to Feige's quote, studios know their movies will be spoiled and want the reveals to be big enough that people go to cinemas anyway. After the blurry scaffolding photo, you could say it was in Sony's best interest to seize control of the narrative and feed the hype.

But I do not think we will ever get a confession unless it is on someone's deathbed, because it would put someone in breach of contract. I do not think Amy Pascal would do this, or even have access to a shot like this. I do know Jon Watts has a history of posting shorts to YouTube, and he put a lot of subtle jokes in Spider-Man: Homecoming through Peter Parker's YouTube history. All of this is circumstantial and, honestly, conspiratorial, and the truth is always more likely incompetence. Still, leaks are sticky, and they embolden the victims of leaks to set the record straight with their own. They do not always give in to that impulse, but they want to, and Sony more than any other studio loves to get sticky.

So what do you think: did Sony leak the Andrew Garfield shot itself?