Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
If you’ve already watched Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, you’re bound to have been blown away by the movie’s visual style, which improves on the already ambitious Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Just like everyone present at the Collider and IMAX screening of the animated movie, our Editor-in-Chief Steve Weintraub was curious about how long it took to put some animated sequences together. Co-director Joaquim Dos Santos had a lot to say about it.
During the Q&A that happened after the screening, Dos Santos singled out one ambitious sequence of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: A Guggenheim action-filled moment that gathers several Spider-people while they hunt for Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore). Dos Santos suggested that it was probably the longest one to complete:
“If you think about the Guggenheim sequence, that was the first thing that we storyboarded, that was the last thing that locked animation in the film. So that was the entire four years that sequence was worked on. I think Justin [K. Thompson, co-director] has the actual figure, but if you were to line up the hours worked on this film in a straight line, it's like 792 hours straight, if it was one person who was doing it straight ahead. So the fact that all these things are happening in tandem, like side by side, that's how these films get made. And it is, I'm telling you, thousands of people, it's insane.”
How Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Differs From Other Animated Films
If you were ever curious to check out behind-the-scenes featurettes, you know that any animated movie is a result of a long, long process. However, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse looks and feels even more complicated to put together, since it mixes different animation styles, features hundreds of characters that the audience will certainly come back to get a better look at, and plays with the viewers’ notions of 2D, 3D, and what an animated movie is supposed to feel and play out like.
And yet, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is only half the story. The movie ends with a cliffhanger that suggests that 2024’s Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse will tie in directly to it, and writers and producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller have already promised that not only more Spider-people are coming, but that the original team from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is returning for a bigger participation.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is out now in theaters everywhere. Check out our interview with Lord and Miller below: