The new preview for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Part One begins right where 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse ended: A slow-opening scene onto new Spider-Man Miles Morales bobbing his head to Post Malone and Swae Lee’s 2019 banger, Sunflower, the duo’s hit soundtrack single for the film.
Miles is lost in Sunflower while food, stuffed animals, and comic books float above his head as a portal opens. Turns out Spidey-pal Gwen Stacey (Shameik Moore) is back to goad the reluctant superhero into joining her across spacetime. Sony’s synopsis tells us that this portal will “transport Brooklyn’s full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man across the Multiverse to join forces with Gwen Stacy and a new team of Spider-People to face off with a villain more powerful than anything they have ever encountered.”
The preview pulls the audience right back into the stunning graphic world of the reluctant new web-slinger. Animation styles flash from nostalgic into the quantum before landing in a fight with Spider-Man 2099 ( (voiced by Oscar Isaac in the first film’s hilarious post-credit scene). If anything, it seems like the filmmakers used Across the Spider-Verse to level up an already stellar story.
While we get a nice little hint, Sony has not revealed who the new villain might be. The less than two-and-a-half-minute scene does suggest a sequel that will still lean heavily on non-stop action, sci-fi conceits, one-liners, and a multitude of animation styles to capture that sensation of getting absorbed in a comic book — film writer/producer Phil Lord and producer Chris Miller’s original intention.
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Spiderman comic artists who populated the many versions of the web-slinger in Into the Spider-Verse actually never stopped working between films. Sony began developing Across the Spider-Verse before Into the Spider-Verse’s 2018 release with the same writing and directing team. The Across the Universe original screenplay, co-created by Lord, Miller, and David Callaham, is highlighted again by a motley Spidey-team, emphasizing the developing relationship between Morales and Gwen Stacy’s Spider-Woman.
In the first film, animators adapted 70-year old art techniques to the digital realm to accomplish a movie made by computers that still looked like a comic book. According to a Sony ‘making-of’ film, this required up to 177 animators, the largest animation crew that Sony Pictures Imageworks had ever used. How many are still at work on finishing the film is not known at the moment, but the studio allotted the same $90 million to bring the second tale to life.
Animation work began in 2020 and creators kept at it through the pandemic. Only delayed by five months, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One) has an Oct. 7, 2022, U.S. release date. Part Two is due sometime in 2023. Further down the road, there’s a female-focused spin-off film in development. You can check out the trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch.
