BY ABBEY WHITE | HollywoodReporter.Com
Troy Warren for CNT #Entertainment
“The idea that we’d be going to different dimensions really opened up an opportunity artistically,” co-writer and producer Chris Miller said.
Miles Morales will be swinging yet again into some groundbreaking visual territory when he returns to the big screen in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One).
In a recent interview with Collider, filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller spoke about their ambitious approach to Sony’s Into the Spider-Verse follow-up. The writers teased that fans who loved the first film’s groundbreaking visuals will be in for yet another “ambitious” effort, according to Lord, in the first half of the two-part sequel.
“It is, as Phil said, a very ambitious sequel because we didn’t want to just sort of do the same thing again,” Miller, who co-wrote the script and is a producing the film, said. “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, and to be able to push the folks at ImageWorks to develop a way to have each dimension feel like it was drawn by a different artist’s hand.”
“Seeing the development of that stuff is breathtaking,” he added, “and really, it’s the reason we keep doing it because it’s so hard to get it right.”
The first footage of Across the Spider-Verse (Part One) was released last December, a two-and-a-half-minute teaser that debuted at Brazil Comic Con. The anticipated animated feature will follow Miles Morales, voiced by Shameik Moore, after being transported to another universe and has a run-in with Spider-Man 2099, the Oscar Isaac-voiced Miguel O’Hara. For his latest adventure, Morales will team once again with Hailee Steinfeld’s Gwen Stacy/Spider-Gwen as well as a new group of web-slingers as they face a new villain.
Into the Spider-Verse won both the Oscar and Golden Globe for best animated film in 2019, coming out on top in a category typically dominated by Disney and Pixar. For the movie, whose creators wanted to resemble comic book art, new techniques were developed that combined the industry’s more classic hand-drawn animation with the latest computer-graphic methods.
“In a traditional CG-rendered film, you are imitating ‘reality,’ but we were trying to imitate the feeling of flipping through a comic, where you get these really expressive ink drawings, but do that in a cinematic way,” Bob Persichetti, one of the directors on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, told The Hollywood Reporter around the film’s release.
Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One) features a screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and David Callaham. Producers for the film, which is slated to hit theaters on Oct. 7, 2022, include Lord and Miller, along with Avi Arad, Amy Pascal and Christina Steinberg.
