While Spider-Man has always been one of the most popular characters in comics, and on the big screen, no Spidey adventure was perhaps quite as loved as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The film’s incredible critical and box office success has spawned a couple of massive Spider-Verse sequels that are currently in production, but producer Christopher Miller is now trying to manage expectations a bit, as the movie may not be quite as massive as you’ve heard.
When producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller took the stage at CinemaCon this week, where they showed off 15 minutes of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse they were quoted as saying that the new Spider-Verse movie had the largest crew of any animated movie that came before. They also said that massive crew translated into the film having 240 characters. If that number seemed a bit excessive, it sort of is. Miller took to Twitter to clarify that the movie has 240 character character models, not 240 important, speaking, characters. Miller said…
To clarify, amidst the universe-hopping there are 240 unique characters that had to be designed and modeled but they’re mostly minor or background characters. The scale is grand, but the story is personal & centers on Miles and his family, along w/ Gwen and a handful of others.
To be sure, the 240 character models that will apparently appear in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is still an incredible and massive achievement. The last movie reportedly only had about 40 character models. But if the massive number of characters was giving anybody the impression that the new film was simply going to be too big, they can relax. The story will still be more intimate, focusing on a much smaller group of important characters.
We know that Stan Lee’s “cameo” in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse extends beyond his spoken words of dialogue as the character model was actually used multiple times to help fill out the background of the film. Now, with this movie’s massive crew, they’re able to model a lot more characters.
And these characters are probably quite diverse as well. Lord and Miller also said at CinemaCon that the movie takes place across six different universes. In the first movie we saw many characters from different universes, but we only saw the briefest glimpses at what those universes actually looked like. It sounds like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will go to many more places, and depending on just how different they are, we could see some very unique characters in the background.
Based on the early reaction to the first 15 minutes of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the new film is looking as good as its predecessor. While we originally thought we would see the next Spider-Verse movie this year, it has been delayed to next summer. That massive crew is being given all the time they need to make something special.
