Among the many things that are so outstanding about Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse – the way it introduces Miles Morales to the big screen, its rapid-fire knockout gags – it’s the animation that elevates it as one of the all-time-greats. It’s a film that looks like nothing else out there, ripping up the sub-Pixar template and creating a whole new aesthetic, blending 2D and 3D styles, presenting different characters at different framerates, and imbuing the whole thing with a printed-page comic book texture. The results were jaw-dropping – and according to Christopher Miller, there’s a lot more to come on that front.
Miller, who co-produced Spider-Verse with creative partner and writer Phil Lord, is back as producer for the second instalment – and in a Tweet, he teased that the animators are once again pushing the boat out for part two. “The development of new groundbreaking art techniques being done for the next Spider-Verse movie are already blowing me away,” he wrote. “It’s going to make the first movie look quaint.” That sounds especially promising – the whole team, including incoming director Joaquim Dos Santos in his feature debut, is going to have its work cut out to top the previous film.
The Spider-Verse sequel began production about a month ago, with lead animator Nick Kondo posting a teaser with the caption ‘First day on the job!’
There’s plenty to get excited about here – not only the prospect of seeing more adventures centred around Miles Morales, but given the enormous success of the previous instalment, could they maybe, somehow, possibly pull off Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland all sharing the screen as their respective live-action incarnations of Peter Parker? We’ll have to wait until 2022 to find out.