Movie

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

2018 · 117 min

Miles Morales is a Brooklyn kid on a scholarship he did not want, tagging abandoned subway stations with his uncle Aaron, when a radioactive spider bites him and the city's Spider-Man dies in front…

Sony Spider-VerseNetflix97%Released
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

The story

Miles Morales is a Brooklyn kid on a scholarship he did not want, tagging abandoned subway stations with his uncle Aaron, when a radioactive spider bites him and the city's Spider-Man dies in front of him a week later. Kingpin's collider has been punching holes into other universes trying to retrieve a dead family.

Five other Spider-People fall through, including a burnt-out divorced Peter B. Parker in sweatpants, and the film becomes a story about the difference between copying someone and becoming yourself. The leap of faith sequence is the best-animated shot of the decade.

Key facts

Release date
14 Dec 2018
Status
Released
Phase
Non-MCU
Saga
Sony Spider-Verse
Runtime
117 min
Certificate
PG
Director
Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Writers
Phil Lord, Rodney Rothman
Streaming
Netflix
Timeline placement
Earth-1610 and five other universes — outside both the MCU and Sony's live-action films

Cast

ActorRole
Shameik MooreMiles Morales (voice)
Jake JohnsonPeter B. Parker (voice)
Hailee SteinfeldGwen Stacy (voice)
Mahershala AliAaron Davis (voice)
Liev SchreiberWilson Fisk (voice)
Nicolas CageSpider-Man Noir (voice)

Characters

Easter eggs

  • Stan Lee cameos as the costume-shop owner who sells Miles a Spider-Man suit and says it always fits eventually; a tribute card to Lee and Steve Ditko closes the film.
  • Peni Parker, Spider-Man Noir and Spider-Ham arrive from three separate real comic lines — SP//dr, Noir and Peter Porker's Spectacular Spider-Ham.
  • The post-credits scene has Miguel O'Hara travel to 1967 and recreate the famous pointing-Spider-Man meme with the animated series' original animation and audio.
  • Chris Pine voices the Earth-1610 Peter Parker whose funeral opens the film, in a blond, polished, corporate-sponsored Spider-Man.
  • Alchemax, the company running the collider, is the megacorporation from the 1992 Spider-Man 2099 comics.
  • Doctor Octopus is Olivia Octavius, a gender-swapped Liv with mechanical arms drawn as hair, voiced by Kathryn Hahn.
  • Aaron Davis is the Prowler, paying off the 'nephew' line Donald Glover delivered in Spider-Man: Homecoming the year before.
  • The Sam Raimi trilogy is referenced repeatedly, including a Spider-Man 2 pizza-delivery gag and the upside-down kiss played as a joke.

Trivia

  • Phil Lord and Chris Miller produced, with Lord co-writing; the pipeline they developed layers hand-drawn linework and printing artefacts over CG.
  • Animators applied Ben-Day dots, chromatic aberration and hand-drawn 'onomatopoeia' text to make the frame read as a printed comic page.
  • Miles animates at twelve frames per second while the experienced Spider-People move at twenty four, so his inexperience is literally in the frame rate.
  • It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, breaking a Disney and Pixar streak that had run almost unbroken since 2010.
  • Roughly 140 animators worked on it, the largest crew Sony Pictures Animation had ever assembled.
  • Nicolas Cage recorded Spider-Man Noir in a deliberately 1930s register, and the character is rendered in black and white throughout.
  • The team developed custom software to allow a single character to be lit and shaded in a different visual style from the characters beside them.

Box office

Budget
$90 million
Worldwide
$384.3 million
Domestic
$190.2 million

Reviews

Critics

97%

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse matches bold storytelling with striking animation for a purely enjoyable adventure with heart and humour to spare.

The MarvelGossips verdict

The best Spider-Man film ever made and one of the great American animated features, full stop. Every frame is doing something no other studio was attempting, and the script is disciplined enough to keep a six-hero multiverse focused entirely on one kid's confidence. The leap of faith is the single best shot in superhero cinema.

Related titles

Frequently asked

Is Into the Spider-Verse connected to the MCU?
No. It exists in Sony's animated Spider-Verse continuity, separate from both the MCU and Sony's live-action films. Its multiverse premise predates the MCU's by three years.
Did it win an Oscar?
Yes, Best Animated Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards, beating Incredibles 2 and Isle of Dogs. It was the first non-Disney, non-Pixar winner in five years.
Why does the animation look like that?
Sony's team built a bespoke pipeline that layers hand-drawn linework, Ben-Day dots and print-style chromatic aberration over CG models, and animates different characters at different frame rates. The techniques have since influenced a generation of animated features.
Will Miles Morales appear in live action?
Nothing has been confirmed. Sony and Marvel have both left the possibility open in interviews without announcing a project, and the Spider-Verse films remain animated-only.
320 × 50