It’s raining Spider-Men—and Spider-Gwens, Spider-Bots, Spider-Cats, and Spider-Punks—in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the 10th Spidey flick to swing into cinemas since 2002. But those are rookie numbers. The many concurrent comic-book series chronicling Ol’ Web-Head’s adventures over the past 60 years have distinguished themselves from one another, sort of, by variously awarding him the descriptors Amazing, Spectacular, and Ultimate, among others. But 2018’s sublime animated feature Into the Spider-Verse, to which this new movie is a direct sequel, could just as accurately have been called The Absurdly Comprehensive* Spider-Man, making a comedic virtue of the sheer variety of ways Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s perennially put-upon, terminally teenage, alliteratively allusive Kennedy-era hero has been adapted and merchandised across every conceivable medium over the decades.
That 2018 film also introduced filmgoers to Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), creators Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli’s beloved 21st-century reimagining of Spider–Man as a 13-year-old biracial kid who excels at science just like Peter Parker did. But he’s also a visual artist who loves hip-hop, and who—in stark contrast to that poor orphan Pete—has two loving and attentive parents who are a little too present in his complicated life.
The mainline Marvel Cinematic Universe flicks had not yet begun to curdle when Into the Spider-Verse dropped, but the cartoon managed to feel fresh and daring among a glut of increasingly look-alike superhero flicks, with its heartfelt story and especially its vibrant visual patois. Blending traditional hand-drawn animation and digital imagery (often within the same frame), the film was a state-of-the-art studio product that still looked and felt handmade, with an adventurous graphic palette that paid homage to first-gen Spider-Man artists like Ditko and John Romita as well as other Marvel artists like Jack Kirby and Bill Sienkiewicz, and filtered their work through a dizzying array of animation styles.
After 40 years of increasingly sophisticated attempts to depict superheroes on screen in a photorealistic way, Spider-Verse yanked the steering wheel in the other direction, leaning in to its four-color origins, right down to the use of split-screen panels and onscreen text. It embraced nearly all preexisting iterations of Spider-Man—even, nay especially—Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider–Ham, the role John Mulaney was born to play. Spider-Verse pierced the veil of glib, self-aware humor that had become endemic to the live-action Marvel films, circling all the way back around from irony to goofy sincerity.
The new one, I’m happy to report, is swollen and unwieldy, but just as good. This despite a shift in the top-line creative team: While cowriters and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are still here, sharing screenplay credit with David Callaham, there is a new trio of directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson. The follow-up has been a long time coming: If time on Earth-1660 (I think) flowed at the rate it does here, Miles would be in college now. And in fact, the animators have given him a much-remarked-upon growth spurt, though the new film is set only about 18 months after the one that came out in our boring dimension four-and-a-half interminable years ago.
You should know this latest Spidey-flick is, how you say, bifurcated. Like the divisive Matrix sequels of 20 years ago, like Avengers: Infinity War, like Denis Villenueve’s 2021 adaptation of Dune, like the supposedly penultimate Mission: Impossible installment due in July, this movie ends on a cliff-hanger. And while all of those examples (save for the not-yet-released Mission) elicited their share of gripes at the time, Across the Spider-Verse is more reminiscent of what another iteration of Spider-Man once called “that really old movie,” The Empire Strikes Back, which left its heroes in a dire spot, but still gave the audience a complete emotional experience. And at 140 minutes—standard freight for a summer tentpole these days, but still unusually long for an animated feature—it’s hard to imagine anyone will come away from this arachnid adventure feeling underfed.
Everything that worked before is expounded upon and innovated rather than simply repeated. Returning hero Spider–Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld) gets a richly expanded backstory here, and the budding—and forbidden—attraction between her and the smitten Miles is beautifully handled. A scene of the two of them having a heart-to-heart as they hang inverted from a ledge of Williamsburgh Savings Bank Tower is one of this very loud film’s quietest, and best. It’s also illustrative of the way the sequel doubles down on the original’s varied visual palette. Scenes between Gwen and her father have a watercolor texture, while Miles’ world is more vibrant and angular. My favorite design element is the way Hobie (Daniel Kaluuya), a 1970s London Spider-Punk, looks like he’s been cut out of a fanzine that predates desktop publishing.
Some of the most rewarding sequels of eras past have inverted the premises of their forebears: The Dirty Harry follow-up Magnum Force found its borderline fascist hero facing off against a squad of vigilante cops whose methods were too extreme even for him. A generation after that, Terminator 2: Judgment Day recast the original’s Arnold Schwarzenegger-model cyborg assassin as his former target’s bodyguard and surrogate dad. Across the Spider-Verse follows in this pattern: Instead of importing a panoply of alternate universe Spider-types into Miles’ world, this one finds Miles thrust into theirs. The richest of these is Mumbattan, wherein the U.S. and India’s most populous cities have merged, somehow, into a megalopolis protected by teenage superhero Pavitr Prabhakar.
This degree of tonally savvy self-awareness—but without the mocking attitude of the lesser live action Marvel flicks—may be part of how these multigenerational mega-franchises sustain themselves, feeding the IP-iteration ouroboros into eternity. If that sounds like a threat, well, your Spidey-sense can relax. For now, anyway.
*Almost Comprehensive. Unless I missed it—and when the joke density is as high as it is here, that’s a distinct possibility—neither Spider-Verse flick has found room to poke fun at 2011’s Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the accident-prone attempt by Julie Taymor, Bono, and the Edge to adapt the saga for the same crowd that kept Cats running on Broadway for 18 years. Get on it, you guys.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse opens June 2 in theaters nationwide.