‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ Creators Return With Multiple Directors: ‘Like Watching a Great Jazz Combo’
A lot of things have changed in the five years since the original “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” movie. And chief among them is that when that movie was released, there were no stories about the multiverse.
Now, Marvel Studios is dedicating a whole era of movies and streaming series to The Multiverse Saga (including, of course, “Spider-Man: No Way Home”) and an indie movie about multiverse-hopping (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”) swept the Oscars in 2023. So how do you come back to a concept that has been picked clean in the years since the first film?
“Well, I feel like there’s two parts,” writer and producer Chris Miller said. “That’s a lot of whizbang, the multiverse stuff, but really it’s about the emotional story and the heart. The rest of it is just noise. But then the other part is that there’s a thing that we can do that the other multiverse movies can’t or don’t do, which is that every world we visit looks like a totally different art style, with an entirely different way of animating it. Every character from a different dimension looks like they were drawn or painted by a different person. It was an extra opportunity that none of the other films that do multiverse things could possibly do.”
Not only is the sequel significantly more complicated on a visual level, but the emotions this time around are even deeper, as we traverse the larger Spider-Verse with Miles (Shameik Moore) and Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), meet Miguel, the hard-assed Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac) and ponder the question: Can you even be Spider-Man without being saddled with a tragic backstory?
“It’s personal,” writer-producer Phil Lord said. “Gwen’s universe is personal. Even Miguel’s universe is personal—and it has a metaphor behind it, which is the future is unwritten. It doesn’t bleed all the way to the end of the page. You can see the underdrawing. Those little nuances that you can do in an animated image really give us a leg up.”
To accomplish all of this, Lord and Miller enlisted a trio of directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson. “It’s too much movie for any one person to do,” Lord said. “But what I enjoy about watching this movie is that it feels like watching a great jazz combo. You’re not watching an individual performance, but rather an amazing band of people who are taking turns, soloing and flexing. Each of these guys has a superpower that you get to see.”
The result is a sprawling two-hour-and-20-minute epic that tells the first part of a two-part story. “I will say it’s scary as hell many, many times during the process,” Dos Santos said. “It is such a long game making these fricking movies. We’ve had the too-long version, we’ve had the too-short version, we’ve had every version in between. And we arrived here because it felt right. That’s the one that landed.”
This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Awards Preview issue here.
Credits
Creative Director: Jeff Vespa
Photographer: Maya Iman
Photo Editor: Tatiana Leiva
Stylist: Kate Bofshever
Hair & Makeup: India Hammond
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