Chris Miller Says Each Dimension in ’Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ Will Have Its Own Animation Style
Christian Zilko
“Spider-Man: No Way Home” has taken pop culture and the box office by storm with its timeline-bending take on the web-slinging hero. But it was not the first film to introduce a multiverse concept to the world of Spider-Man. “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” the 2018 animated film from Sony, was an unexpected critical and box office hit. The movie followed young protagonist Miles Morales as he traveled across dimensions with other iterations of the arachnid hero, including Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld) and a noir version of Spider-Man voiced by Nicolas Cage.
The movie was praised for its creative approach to Spider-Man and helped set the stage for the success of “No Way Home.” A sequel was immediately announced and went into production in 2020. In December, Sony revealed that it would be an epic story told in two parts, beginning with this year’s “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part I).” If that wasn’t enough to excite Spider-Man fans, a new interview with executive producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller revealed that the new films will continue to push the boundaries of animation.
Speaking with Collider, Miller said that “Across the Spider-Verse” is “a very ambitious sequel, because we didn’t want to just sort of do the same thing again. And so the idea that we’d be going to different dimensions really opened up an opportunity artistically to have each world have its own art style.”
This is not the first time Lord and Miller have praised the ambitious work being done by the film’s animators. Miller previously said that “the development of new groundbreaking art techniques being done for the next ‘Spider-Verse’ movie are already blowing me away. It’s going to make the first movie look quaint.”
However, the news that each dimension will have a different animation style is sure to excite fans and prompt plenty of online speculation leading up to the film’s release. “No Way Home” may have given the live action treatment to the Spider-Man multiverse, but the “Across the Spider-Verse” team appears confident that there is still plenty they can do that is unique to the medium of animation.
“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part 1)” is expected to hit theaters in October 2022, with “Part 2” to follow in 2023.
