How many spiders are too many? If you’re arachnophobic, just the thought of them can be overwhelming. In the Marvel universe, you probably can’t have a surplus. Spider-Man meets Spider-Man meets… Spider-Gwen in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, an upcoming animated film from Sony.
And Sony may have… done something decent with the Spider-Man franchise with this one. Peter Parker, the original Spider-Man, meets up with Ultimate Marvel’s Miles Morales and Earth-65’s Spider-Gwen in a film that… we’re not really sure what’s going on, based on the trailer, but it sure does have a lot of heroes.
What we do know is that Parker is going to be mentoring Miles Morales as he comes to grips with being the Spider-Man. Or a Spider-Man, at least. Parker is… about what we’d expect from an older (but still doofy) superhero. Morales has to deal with a lot of the same stuff that we’ve seen from Peter Parker’s younger years, like school, family, peers… and then there’s the whole being a mutant spider thing. At some point Spider-Gwen shows up and there’s bound to be a villain in there somewhere.
We can catch a glimpse of a few in the trailer, one of whom might be Kingpin (a peek at the film’s IMDB page confirms that one) and another that might be the Green Goblin (or Hobgoblin), but there’s little detail on what to expect conflict-wise. We don’t mind too much for the moment.
And that’s because we’re distracted by how gorgeous it all looks. There are more than a few nods to the comic books here, with brief stills that could have been ripped straight from Marvel’s pages, and little caption bars offering exposition. The entire art style used for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is unlike anything we’ve seen from a Marvel animated feature but we sure do like what Sony has done. If you were going to breathe life into a comic, this is how you’d do it.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is set to premiere in December this year, with 14 December being the American date. We’re not sure yet whether we’ll be seeing this one in theatres here in SA. We certainly hope so, this one would suit a viewing on the big screen.