Five years after the release of the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Miles Morales and his Spider-friends are finally returning to the big screen in Across the Spider-Verse—and the sequel has a lot to live up to.
Into the Spider-Verse shook up the animation industry with its imaginative storytelling approach, one whose innovative visual language blended a multitude of art styles to make the film feel like a comic book come to life. With writing-producing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller aiming even higher in their much-anticipated follow-up, Sony Pictures has invested accordingly: Across the Spider-Verse reportedly cost $100 million, before marketing, compared to its predecessor’s budget of $90 million. While the first film had one main animation style that dominated the movie, Across the Spider-Verse has six of them. The new story even swelled to the point that it had to be split across two movies, with Beyond the Spider-Verse slated for release in 2024. Everything about this sequel seems to stem from its ambitions to succeed by providing more—more animation styles, more narrative, all backed by more money. And that approach also applies to one of the main sources of the franchise’s irreverent comedy: more Spider-people.
While Into the Spider-Verse kept Miles’s Spider-crew relatively small after the death of his world’s Peter Parker, capping it at six, Brooklyn’s one and only Spider-Man will soon meet a near-countless number of his superhero counterparts as he discovers the so-called Spider Society in Across the Spider-Verse. That includes their leader, Miguel O’Hara (Spider-Man 2099, voiced by Oscar Isaac), Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman, voiced by Issa Rae), Pavitr Prabhakar (voiced by Karan Soni), and the guitar-wielding Hobie Brown (Spider-Punk, voiced by Daniel Kaluuya).
Although the proliferation of Spider-Man’s alternate selves may feel like something of a gimmick, especially during an era when the multiverse has become a far-too-common storytelling device in Hollywood, the vast majority of the characters in Across the Spider-Verse have previously appeared across various forms of media in the 60-plus years since Stan Lee and Steve Ditko created Spider-Man for Marvel Comics. And their inclusion in the film highlights just how wide Spider-Man’s web of spinoff Spider-characters has grown.
TV and comic book writer Cody Ziglar (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law), the current scribe for the ongoing Miles Morales: Spider-Man series, pinpoints what makes Spider-Man such a rich character template for all these new variations to draw on. “When they created the original Peter Parker, everything came together to create this very universal superhero archetype that people latch on to,” Ziglar tells The Ringer. “Spider-people are usually on the younger side—early teens, maybe late teens—and their core character traits are: trying to do the right thing; a little bit of humor attached to them; and being caught between two worlds. There’s something appealing about having those three traits that can be taken and planted into different characters. It makes the character easier to write and easier to get into.”
That relatability factor is what has made Spider-Man Marvel’s flagship character since he was introduced in the 1960s. Instead of being a supersoldier war hero who punched Hitler in the face, a literal god, or a billionaire playboy with fancy gadgets, Peter Parker started off as an orphaned high schooler, living with his aunt and uncle in New York City, who shared the same struggles of adolescence as any regular teenager and who had money problems. Despite all the hardships and tragedies he had faced, and those he would continue to face in the many years to come (including getting killed several times), Spider-Man would walk it off and fight again because he simply had to.
As author Douglas Wolk suggests in his book on the long history of Marvel Comics, All of the Marvels, the story of Spider-Man is one about growing, and failing, in a Sisyphean quest for self-improvement. “The biggest difference between Spider-Man and every other well-known superhero, though, is the specific genre to which his story belongs,” Wolk writes. “It’s a bildungsroman, the story of how a youth becomes an adult. In the comics, it’s a very long story, and it comes in observable cycles; it’s ‘The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.’ Peter is not yet—never yet—the person he needs to become.”
This eternal narrative cycle has been told and retold across more than 4,000 comic books, almost a dozen movies, dozens of video games, several TV shows, and one disastrous stage musical. The main continuity of Spider-Man comics has been retconned and rebooted more times than one can feasibly count. But these stories can be revisited with fresh perspectives, and their defining coming-of-age elements can remain intact no matter who’s wearing the mask. Peter Parker always will be the original Webslinger, but for new generations of Spider-Man fans who have grown up with Into the Spider-Verse, Insomniac Games’ bestselling Spider-Man: Miles Morales, or the comics that started with writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli in 2011 in Marvel Comics’ Ultimate Universe, Miles Morales is the Spider-Man.
“The whole thesis behind the Ultimate comic line is that you didn’t have to be tied to 60 years of lore—it’s a fresh start for new audiences,” Ziglar explains. “And that’s how we got Miles Morales. That’s really what got me into Spider-Man comics proper, Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man run. That was a huge influence on me, not only for Spider-Man, but just superhero comics in general. It really opened the floodgates for me.”
Spinoff characters are by no means unique to Spider-Man. From Batman’s Bat Family to the heroes currently being adapted to the screen in the MCU’s Multiverse Saga, such as Kamala Khan or She-Hulk, the introduction of descendant characters has been a common practice in superhero comics for decades. Comic publishers are constantly seeking new narrative avenues to attract new readers, and it’s far easier for a new character to sell with a little push from well-established titles. But an example of this approach as successful as Miles Morales also shows how much of an opportunity it can be when handled properly—for Marvel, from a sales perspective, but also for consumers who now have a hero that they can better relate to, and who doesn’t have a decades-long history to parse through.
When descendant characters are done right, they can provide the perfect entry point for a new audience to engage with a new character that borrows some defining elements from the original, while building something that it can call its own. Spider-Punk, for example, was created by Dan Slott and Olivier Coipel in 2015, but given how little material there was about him before Ziglar wrote the character’s first miniseries in 2022, Ziglar, artist Justin Mason, and the rest of their team had the chance to remix and deconstruct classic Marvel characters in an anarchistic universe of their own, while throwing in plenty of references to their favorite punk songs and artists along the way.
“They gave us such freedom to really do what we want to,” Ziglar says. “Everyone wasn’t going to really know who Spider-Punk was—there’s not going to be Spider-Punk videogames. There are more people that know about Peter Parker and have an idea of him; Marvel, or any comic book company, is going to be more protective of that. DC’s going to be more protective of Superman than they are of Ambush Bug. Because of that, you get so much more freedom.
“When I came in, at that point we’d gotten maybe under 30 pages’ worth of Spider-Punk stuff spread across all these different comics,” Ziglar continues. “There isn’t really much that we had to be beholden to. We would basically say, ‘What’s a way that we can take a pre-established character and not only punkify them, but make them feel like a part of this universe?’”
A similar opportunity to expand on and recreate characters was afforded to the directors, writers, visual artists, and voice actors behind Into the Spider-Verse, and again to everyone responsible for Across the Spider-Verse, including the latter film’s new take on Hobie Brown. The sheer number of all of these Spider-people can get a little overwhelming at times in the comics, and there are those who have argued in years past that the rising number of them fragments the audience instead of increasing it. But if Into the Spider-Verse is any indication, these films have a way of cutting through the inherent ridiculousness of the expanding Spider-roster with their brand of self-aware humor, while also highlighting what makes each character special.
“They seem to have such a cool take on Hobie,” Ziglar says of Across the Spider-Verse. “I’m just excited that more people are going to know who this character is and, hopefully, get people into reading more books. But also if it gets some people into punk music, that’d be cool, too. I’m not going to be mad at more punk fans.”
With Miles and his family as the anchor to the chaos of the Spider-Verse, the franchise never loses hold of its narrative goal of illustrating what makes Miles unique in a multiverse of Spider-people, or of conveying its message that “anyone can wear the mask,” an idea that has been crucial to the Spider-Man ethos all along. The popularity of Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse (which is currently tracking for a huge opening at the box office) has already led to Sony announcing a live-action Miles Morales film and an animated Spider-Woman movie. There aren’t any specific details on exactly which Spider-Woman that movie might star. But given the growing popularity of Spider-Gwen in recent years, particularly after Into the Spider-Verse, one could imagine that we’ll soon see a solo film dedicated to Gwen Stacy (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld). And who knows, the same fate may be in store for Spider-Punk as this Spider-industry continues to feed off of its own successes.