Indian Twitter threatens to ‘boycott Spider-Man’ after identity mix-up with author Tom Holland

India has increasingly become an important market for Marvel Studios in recent years, but could do nothing about this week’s bizarre social media storm, as Mayank Aggarwal reports

The new Spider-Man movie – starring the actor Tom Holland, not the historian – is scheduled to hit theatres in December 2021 (AP)

Thousands of Indian Twitter users threatened to boycott Spider-Man late on Thursday in the sort of social media storm that typically leaves corporate public relations officers scrambling to make amends – except this time, Marvel Studios had done nothing wrong.

The outpouring of anger was triggered after a sarcastic tweet from Tom Holland about India’s brand new cricket stadium, the largest in the world, being named after its sitting prime minister Narendra Modi.

The only problem was that the Tom Holland in question was the cricket fan, historian and Dominion author – not the young British actor who plays the web-slinging superhero.

Holland (the historian) began the controversy with his comments about the demolished 55,000-seater Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad, Gujarat – named after the country’s first deputy prime minister and an independence struggle hero – returning as a 110,000-seater arena and renamed the “Narendra Modi Stadium”.

Reacting to this, he posted on Twitter: “I’m a huge admirer of the modesty Modi showed in naming the world’s largest cricket stadium after himself. Not always a good sign for countries when leaders start pulling that trick...”

At first he just received a smattering of comments calling him names and telling him to stay out of India’s “internal affairs”. But the reaction took on a life of its own when confusion with his actor namesake saw #BoycottSpiderman trending in India.

The actor – who, in a twist of fate was promoting his new film Spider-Man: No Way Home as the drama in India unfolded – has yet to comment.

But the historian saw the funny side in a series of follow-up tweets on Thursday and Friday.

“Oh dear – I seem single-handedly to have destroyed prospects for the next Spider-Man in India. My apologies to @SpiderManMovie. I should have remembered that with great power comes great responsibility,” he tweeted.

In another, he wrote: “Still, you know what? Never let a crisis go to waste... #BoycottSpiderman #BuyDominion.”

While Holland made light of the situation, the episode highlights just how quickly such backlashes can flare up online and, increasingly, spill over into real world consequences in a modern-day India that is more digitally connected than ever before.

Recent months have seen cases where brands had to pull major advertising campaigns overnight after objections from a small section of the online community snowballed into a mainstream outcry.

Dr Falguni Vasavada-Oza, professor of marketing at Ahmedabad’s Mudra Institute of Communications, said the social media world was very fickle and that boundaries are “blurring between real life and life on social media”.

“Tomorrow, someone can come and troll me for some of my views, stating ‘how can I say that, being a teacher’. So, an overlap is bound to happen, and this is going to be problematic. This has grown in the last four or five years… the line and guidelines will need to be drawn,” she told The Independent.

Though the fallout of an online backlash can be deadly serious for some, the historian Holland – who is unlikely to be relying on the Indian market for the bulk of his Dominion sales – was happy to have the last laugh.

“Just for the record, and to save Marvel’s profits in India, I freely acknowledge that Narendra Modi is a man of immense humility,” he tweeted, “and that his naming the world’s largest cricket stadium after himself is in no way quite hilariously immodest.”