Image from Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. Courtesy of Sony Pictures.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, produced by Lord and Miller, was released at the end of 2018 and went on to gross $375 million and win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Most of the nerds I know really liked it and were super geeked about it, although I think there was generally a sense that the film’s box office, although decent, was disappointing by super hero standards, especially given the perceived high quality of this film.
I love, love, loved the animation. It’s super clean, hyper-stylized with splashes of psychedelic overtones. The film is about universes colliding, and the animation style reflects that. It starts out with a kind of roto-scoped feel, but as the universe starts to bend in on itself, the animation becomes increasingly kinetic and frayed. Stylistically, and even thematically with all the weird subversive psychedelic stuff, this film kind of reminded me of Heavy Metal, but with less boobs and more cartoon pigs. Occasionally the noise was dialed up a bit on the high side, but overall it’s a really enjoyable purely visual experience.
With a screenplay from Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman the script is also tight, with jokes coming about every 1/2 second. Like any good animation (which can’t do re-shoots and needs to be tightly structured well before it goes into production) the plot moves fast - lightning speed, really. Which I like. Because you don’t want to spend too much time thinking about the logical consistency of this universe collider machine. It’s much more important that the plot carry you along propulsively as it introduces a wide array of characters drawn from decades of comic book lore and crashes them into one another. The movie is steeped in deep cuts from the comics, stuff that went way over my head but I could still appreciate the skill and knowledge of the source material that went into it. Good job, nerds!
There’s also some interesting implications of this film in terms of the wider industry. Sony owns the rights to Spider-Man, clearly an extremely valuable piece of IP. However, they had been spending quite a bit of capital ruining it with terrible movies, so they finally cut a deal with Marvel to bring Spider-Man into the MCU on a short-term basis. Despite this deal, they still moved forward with this animated version, which exists separately from the MCU and, as I understand it, did not have any creative involvement from Marvel Studios. They worked around this, rather cleverly I would say, by setting it in an alternate universe. Therefore, the Tom Holland Spider-Man of the MCU could very well exist - just in another universe from the Miles Morales Spider-Man of this animated Sony universe, and Sony could claim that they are not intruding on the creative territory they share with Marvel and Disney.
So in that sense, Sony created an alternate animated Spider-Verse (cheekily referenced by Marvel in Spider-Man Far From Home) about colliding universes in order to avoid colliding with the real life fictional Marvel universe. Talk about life imitating art imitating life.
Phew! It’s hard being a nerd!
