On 6 May 2025, Rockstar Games released the second official trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, an event that rapidly translated into a measurable, industry-shifting marketing achievement. Within 24 hours of release, the trailer accumulated more than 475 million views across all platforms, surpassing the previous record for the biggest video launch in history, which had been held by Marvel Studios' Deadpool & Wolverine (Stedman, 2025). The accomplishment was particularly notable because it positioned a video game promotional asset above a marquee Hollywood superhero release in raw audience reach, reframing how the entertainment industry perceives game marketing. Yet the record proved temporary: in March 2026, the first trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day eclipsed the figure, recording an estimated 718.6 million views in 24 hours and roughly 500 million within only 12 hours (D'Alessandro, 2026; Loveridge, 2026). This report examines how GTA 6 Trailer 2 captured and briefly held the record, the strategic context surrounding its release, and the implications of its eventual surpassing by the next Spider-Man instalment.
Rockstar published Trailer 2 on its official YouTube channel and synchronously across X, Instagram, and TikTok on the morning of 6 May 2025, accompanied by a website overhaul featuring 70 screenshots, full character bios, and location descriptions for Leonida (Wikipedia, 2026). The trailer's runtime of just over three minutes incorporated The Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together," Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight," Zenglen's "Child Support," and Tammy Wynette's "Talkin' to Myself Again," reinforcing the 1980s-inflected Vice City aesthetic (NME, 2025).
Within 24 hours, Trailer 2 generated more than 475 million cross-platform views, eclipsing Deadpool & Wolverine's February 2024 first-trailer launch, which had stood as the benchmark for any video debut, not just within film (Stedman, 2025). The Hollywood Reporter underscored that the figure was an aggregate measure across YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok, a methodology consistent with how Deadpool & Wolverine's record was originally certified. The featured Pointer Sisters song saw a 182,000% spike in Spotify streams in the days afterward, mirroring the cultural ripple effect of the first trailer's use of Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" in December 2023 (Stedman, 2025; NME, 2025).
The scale of the launch was not accidental. The 17-month gap between Trailer 1 (December 2023) and Trailer 2 (May 2025) had created an intense backlog of anticipation, amplified by a delay announcement that pushed the release window from late 2025 into 2026 (BBC News, 2025). Rockstar deliberately leveraged this pent-up demand by withholding gameplay details, character names, and the official release window until the trailer drop, ensuring the moment functioned as a global cultural event rather than a routine promotional beat. Analysts noted that the trailer's metrics confirmed GTA 6 had transcended the gaming category, becoming a mainstream entertainment phenomenon comparable to the launch of a tentpole feature film (Stedman, 2025).
The achievement also reinforced trends established by Trailer 1, which had set the record for most first-day views on a non-music YouTube video (93 million in 24 hours) and remained the second-most-viewed trailer of any kind by November 2025, with 268 million cumulative views (Wikipedia, 2026). The two trailers, taken together, generated billions of cumulative impressions and demonstrated the marketing leverage of the Grand Theft Auto brand. Trailer 2 was subsequently honoured with Best Game Trailer at the 2025 Golden Joystick Awards (Wikipedia, 2026).
The record's longevity was, however, less than a year. In March 2026, Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios released the first trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which surged past GTA 6 Trailer 2's metric. According to Deadline, the Spider-Man trailer accumulated approximately 718.6 million global views in its first 24 hours, with more than 500 million logged in only 12 hours (D'Alessandro, 2026; Loveridge, 2026). The figure not only displaced Rockstar from the top of the leaderboard but did so by a margin of more than 240 million views, suggesting that the underlying audience appetite for blockbuster trailer events continues to grow as cross-platform measurement standards mature.
Despite being surpassed, Trailer 2's record retains historical and analytical significance. It marked the first time a video game asset had held the all-format trailer record, signalling to studios, publishers, and analysts that interactive entertainment campaigns can compete head-to-head with theatrical marketing. The record also established a higher baseline for what publishers expect from event-style promotional drops, with subsequent campaigns from competing publishers reportedly recalibrating their release strategies to maximise simultaneous multi-platform deployment.
The Trailer 2 milestone, even though briefly held, reshaped industry conversation in three concrete ways. First, it demonstrated to advertisers and platforms that gaming trailers are a top-tier audience driver, on par with or exceeding the largest film campaigns. Second, it validated Rockstar's restrained promotional cadence, in which long silences are punctuated by deliberately scaled events. Third, it set the competitive benchmark that Spider-Man: Brand New Day would subsequently target and surpass, illustrating an emerging arms race in trailer-launch engineering across entertainment categories.
BBC News, 2025. What have we learned from Grand Theft Auto 6's second trailer? [online] Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g2grmrx4po [Accessed 14 May 2026].
D'Alessandro, A., 2026. Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer views records. Deadline. [online] Available at: https://deadline.com [Accessed 14 May 2026].
Loveridge, S., 2026. Spider-Man: Brand New Day first trailer breaks viewership records. GamesRadar+. [online] Available at: https://www.gamesradar.com [Accessed 14 May 2026].
NME, 2025. Every song in the GTA 6 second trailer. [online] Available at: https://www.nme.com [Accessed 14 May 2026].
Stedman, A., 2025. Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer 2 surpasses Deadpool & Wolverine's record for biggest video launch. The Hollywood Reporter. [online] Available at: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com [Accessed 14 May 2026].
Wikipedia, 2026. Grand Theft Auto VI. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI [Accessed 14 May 2026].