They called him Spencer is a German-Austrian documentary about Bud Spencer from 2017 by Karl-Martin Pold. The world premiere took place on 23 June 2017 with the participation of the Pedersoli family at the international film festival Munich. The Italian premiere took place on 31 October 2017 at the international film festival of Rome The film came to the German and Austrian cinemas at the same time on 27 July 2017. Due to cross-media marketing, the film project was able to generate a high level of media attention in Germany and abroad before the release of the film and was already appreciated during the production with several prizes. Already before its release, they had called it Spencer a considerable fan community (with nearly 270,000 Facebook followers the film has one of the largest fan communities in Europe) and is considered a pioneering project of Web 2.0 regarding crowdfunding/crowdsourcing and cross-media film production.