Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

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Lizzie, we are discussing, as you mentioned, the joyous, wonderful Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse. And I just have to ask, had you seen this movie before and what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast? You know, I had not seen this. And I think part of that was I was working at IMDb when this came out and it was like so much of the movies that I watched were for work and not necessarily for enjoyment. I wasn't covering this one. I'm also not a big Spider-Man fan. Not to say I haven't enjoyed quite a lot of Spider-Man movies, but it's not like a franchise that I would seek out. So I just didn't see this. I knew it was supposed to be great. I, you know, I knew that there was Spider-Ham and, you know, Spider-Man Noir, and it sounded great, but I just didn't watch it. And then watching it for the podcast, I was just, I was blown away by how good this movie is. It didn't rely on the surprises. I went in knowing all, pretty much all of the twists that were gonna happen, and it didn't matter because it's so good. And it's so sweet. And it's honestly, I think it is the most successful visual representation of comic book reading on screen in a movie. I think what they did in this movie is absolutely remarkable. It looks incredible. The cast is insane. And it's, you know, it values the story above all of that. And it's just so nice to see. I love that they also, I think, used the idea of the multiverse successfully, which is so frequently leaned on in these movies, Cough Cough Marvel, I think to diminishing returns, but not in this at all. They use it in such a brilliant way. And, you know, I think the way that people fantasize of like, do I get a second chance? Is that how this would work? And the answer is both yes and no, I think in different instances across this movie. But yeah, I loved it. It was one of my favorite movies we've covered. It was just so, so good. Well, I couldn't agree more. As our audience, well, as our long-term listeners know, I am not the biggest fan of meta films. Deadpool can die in a pool. But this is the exception that proves the rule. This movie absolutely works for me because, Lizzie, as you mentioned, it winks at all of the conventions of superhero movies and comic book tropes, not in a way that feels cynical, but instead to simply add more heart to the story. And this movie has such a beating heart. And we'll talk about, I think, the main theme and how that ties into all the themes of today's episode. It's just so unbelievably inventive. This is the definition of coloring outside the lines in so many ways, literally and figuratively. I think it is probably the most visually joyous movie of the last 25 years. I agree. And it's moving. It's inspiring. Again, the visuals are jaw-dropping. It is so colorful. It reminds you, it reminded me of how bland movies actually can feel because of the lack of color, the inability to embrace color fully, which I must say, to their credit, something the Avatar movies do very well. I know we just took them down a peg or two over December, but they are wonderfully colorful in a desaturated landscape of streaming sludge sometimes. And like you said, Lizzie, this feels more like a comic book than any comic book movie I've ever seen. We covered Hulk. Hulk admirably attempts some of the things that are at play here. This movie does it so well, so consistently. It's never distracting. It's always heightening. It's a wild ride of a movie with nary a false beat. And it's a movie that asks, Who is the real Spider-Man? Who owns him? And maybe today we can figure that out. But before we begin, the details. Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse is the first entry into Sony's Spider-Verse trilogy. It was written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. It was directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. It was produced by Avi Arad, Amy Pascal, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Christina Steinberg under the Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment, and Sony Pictures Animation banners. And it stars, as you mentioned, Lizzie, a murderer's row of voice actors. Is there anyone in particular that you like, just in particular, liked in this movie? Just like if there's one, is there any one person that stood out to you? Because there's so many that could. Honestly, well, I mean, first of all, Shameik Moore is wonderful. He is so great carrying the lead of this movie. Jake Johnson, I always love. I just love him. You know, since New Girl, can't get enough Jake Johnson. Your friendly dirtbag Spider-Man, Jake Johnson. So good. Could not do it better. But, you know, I was really taken with Haley Steinfeld. She's great. As Gwen Stacy. Spider-Gwen. She's so good. And like everything she's ever done, she is so good. And I want to see more from her and more voice acting. She's got a beautiful voice and she did a really, really great job in this. What about you? I got to say, Liev Schreiber as Wilson Fisk's kingpin. He has such a great voice. He does. And he has such a good villain's voice. And he does a good job slightly disguising his voice as well. I think he gives the character a voice. It doesn't sound exactly like Leif Scriber's just, you know, speaking himself. So I really liked his performance. But as you mentioned, Shamik Moore as Miles Morales. Jake Johnson as Peter B. Parker. Haley Steinfeld as Gwen Stacy. Mahershala Ali as Uncle Aaron. Also great. Brian Tyree Henry as Jefferson Davis. Also great. Luna Lauren Velez as Rio Morales. Lily Tomlin as Aunt May. Zoe Kravitz as Mary Jane, John Mulaney as Spider-Ham, Nicholas Cage as Spider-Man Noir, Kimiko Glenn as Penny Parker, Catherine Hahn as Doc Ock, Liv Schreiber as Wilson Fix, and as we mentioned, many, many more big names in small roles. Chris Pine as the OG Spider-Man. Chris Pine as the OG Spider-Man, Jorma Ticone as Green Goblin. So it was released by Sony Pictures on December 14th, 2018. And as always, the IMDb logline reads, Teen Miles Morales becomes the Spider-Man of his universe and must join with five spider-powered individuals from other dimensions to stop a threat for all realities. Yeah. Pretty good. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, Marvel Spider-Man, a history and celebration of the web slinger decade by decade by Matthew K. Manning and Robert Greenberger, interviews with key team members from the film, from Cartoon Brew slash film and marvel.com, how animators created the Spider-Verse by Wired, how Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse changed the animation game by Vulture, and many, many other articles, retrospectives, and interviews with those involved in the film. And Lizzie, the question remains, how did a bit of a crushing corporate defeat, a couple of Hollywood chaos agents and a scrappy animation team breaking every rule in the book, make, for my money, the greatest Spider-Man movie ever? I agree. And what went wrong? Well, Lizzie, let's take it back a week to the Sony hack. Please. All right. Do you want to give us just like a one sentence Sony hack primer? Sure. I'm going to say it the right way to lead into this episode. Sure. So as we learned last week, and if you want more detail on this, there's a lot more in the interview episode. Basically, all you need to know is that following the production and impending release of the film, The Interview, Sony was hacked by some hackers calling themselves the Guardians of Peace. FBI says it's North Korea. It probably was. We don't know for sure. But the important thing is that they hacked into Sony's system and they absolutely wrecked it. They leaked personal data of thousands of employees. They leaked thousands upon thousands of documents and emails, particularly from Sony's top brass, including Amy Pascal, who is one of the producers on this movie. She ended up leaving her position at Sony due to, in part, what was exposed in this hack, which included some not-so-great racist emails. But that's about it. It was a very damaging, very, very, very expensive hack. And one of the things that we didn't discuss last week that was leaked that November of 2014 was evidence that Sony, despite the fact that they were battling hackers, theater chains, WikiLeaks, their own employees in court, maybe waving the white flag in a different battle, the battle over Spider-Man. Long had Spider-Man fanboys, or Spider-Boys as I'll call them, raged at Sony to relinquish control of the webbed hero to Marvel, which was on a generational run. Sony had no way of knowing this, but maybe Lizzie ceding control of Spider-Man would open up a whole new universe of possibilities. So about a year before the Sony hack, in December of 2013, Sony officially announced the Spider-Man universe. Not the Spider-Verse, but close enough. It was going to be built around the planned Amazing Spider-Man 3, which was going to come out on June 10th, 2016. And if you remember, Lizzie, those movies starred... Garfield? Mr. Andrew Garfield. That's right. The other movies that were going to be released as part of this universe would be Venom and the Sinister Six. They had directors in line, Alex Kurtzman, Drew Goddard. And the language that Sony used in this announcement was especially informative. They called it a move to forge a new legacy in the story of Peter Parker on screen. But it wasn't really a new legacy. I mean, all due respect to Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and eventually Tom Holland. But they're kind of the actor's equivalent of that Spider-Man meme of the three Spider-Men pointing at each other. Well, I mean, they literally do it. They do it eventually in the sequel to Spider-Man Homecoming. So this is something that seems to have always bothered a particular comic book writer and artist, Brian Michael Bendis, considering that two years prior to this, he had killed Peter Parker. In June of 2011, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man died. Okay, it wasn't in the main timeline, which is called The Amazing Spider-Man in the Marvel comics. It was in volume two of issue 160 of The Ultimate Spider-Man. Now, the ultimate timeline began its run in 2000, and it was an alternate universe for younger readers, and it was helmed by Bendis and Mark Miller. And in this issue, and by the way, the art is fantastic. These are extremely wonderfully realized, like dramatic situations. You can definitely see some of the way that the characters are proportioned and whatnot in the eventual film are kind of pulled from the style of these comics, and it's really cool. So Spider-Man finds himself overmatched by a hulked up Green Goblin, much like the beginning of this movie. And the Green Goblin has been supercharged by Johnny Storm's flame powers. Yes, there's other superheroes here that are not present in the movie. Mary Jane nearly saves the day with a stolen truck and a pretty cool out of the blue moment. Spider-Man spashes the Green Goblin, but the ensuing explosion is too much and he dies in Aunt May's arms. He couldn't save Uncle Ben, but he manages to save her. He was dead and it was a big deal. Here's a headline from The Guardian. Spider-Man death changes everything for Marvel. Brian Bendis said, it occurred to me that if Peter passed away in a meaningful way, he could be the Uncle Ben character to a new Spider-Man. But who would be that new Spider-Man? And could he match the originality of our friendly neighborhood hero's debut? David, I need you to cue one of those hip spider tracks that kicks in whenever they do these like origin story things in the movie. All right, let's do this one last time. My name is Stan Lee. Back in 1962, I was looking for inspiration. I'd made the Fantastic Four, but my publisher wanted another superhero. I saw a fly crawling on the wall and pow, blam! Fly man. No, mosquito man. No, spider man. That sounds pretty good. Okay, maybe I had some other inspiration. Back when I was a kid, I used to love this guy called the spider. He had a ring with the imprint of a spider, and when he punched his enemies in the face, it would leave a spider-shaped mark. pretty sweet. But Spider-Man was going to be different. I ran to my publisher and said, he's going to be a teenager and he's going to have personal problems. My publisher said, that sucks. People hate spiders. Teenagers are sidekicks and superheroes don't have personal problems. So I begged and I reminded him that this was going to be the last issue of Amazing Fantasy. So if Spider-Man flops, who cares? And my publisher said, fine, I'm late for my golf appointment. A month later, the sales numbers came in and my publisher burst into my office. Stan, Stan, you remember that character we both loved so much, Spider-Man? Let's do him as a series. And that's how Peter Parker made his debut in Amazing Fantasy number 15. A copy sold for $3.6 million in 2021. How's that for personal problems? So the real Spider-Man? That was all me, Stan Lee. Lizzie, how familiar are you with Spider-Man's origin stories? Have you seen the Tobey Maguire movie? Yes. It's actually pretty close. So let's just take a quick recap on the original, original Spider-Man. So Peter Parker, he's an honor student. His teachers love him. His Aunt May and Uncle Ben love him. But all the other kids at the school are like, you nerd. He tries to hang out with them, but he's a wallflower. And that's how he ends up going to a great new exhibit at the science hall all by himself. It's about experiments and radioactivity, which, you know, they're just going to put within reach of kids because this was the 60s. A tiny spider wanders into the scene, gets blasted with radiation. and in shock, just before it dies, it bites the nearest living thing, which is Peter's hand. And before you know it, he's scaling buildings, crushing steel with his bare hands. And then he enters, do you remember what he enters in the Sam Raimi film? Because they actually do a version of this. No, I haven't seen it in forever. He enters a wrestling competition. Oh. It's like a cage fight in the Sam Raimi version. In case it goes terribly, he conceals his identity by taking off his glasses and wrapping his face in what appear to be fishnet stockings. He wins. A TV producer gives him his card, says, I can make you a fortune. You'd be a smash on The Ed Sullivan Show. He goes home. He makes a proper suit. He's got the wrist web slingers. They shoot liquid cement. And the suit looks kind of pretty much like the one we all know. Would you like to see it, Lizzie? Yes. All right. Let's give you a look right here. There's one difference that I'd like you to point out to me. Oh, yeah. He's got like a little lady's lace cape following behind him. A little web cape. Little web cape underneath the armpits to keep things looking nice. Yeah. But otherwise, it looks very accurate to how we would eventually see him. So he dubs himself Spider-Man. He gets a booked appearance on TV. As he leaves the station, he sees a police officer chasing a burglar and decides not to intervene. The officer says, why didn't you help? And Spider-Man says, sorry, pal, that's your job. I'm through being pushed around by anyone from now on. I just look out for number one. And that means me. He becomes an overnight sensation in Hollywood. But one night he comes home after another TV appearance to find cars in the driveway. His uncle Ben has been murdered by the same man that he let go when he walked by that police officer earlier in our story. He captures that burglar in his web and walks into the night aware that at last in this world with great power, Lizzie, there must also come great responsibility, great accountability, as they wonderfully misquoted in this movie. Yeah, that's the bare bones. Let's jump forward. I am going to skip the long history of Spider-Man's appearances in television because we have a lot to get to. And in 1999, Sony bought the rights to Spider-Man for film for a reported $7 million. This led to Sam Raimi's Spider-Man starring... Tobey Maguire. Tobes McGee, released in 2002, and it arguably is the film that kickstarted the modern superhero era. I know some people could say X-Men. It's pretty good. It's great. Yeah. I will say I actually quite like Spider-Man, I realized, because I think the first two Tobey Maguire films are very, very good. They are. They're great. And I think the Andrew Garfield ones are pretty solid. They don't bother me. And I like the Tom Holland ones, too. They don't bother me. It's just not I just maybe don't love superhero stuff that much. I don't gravitate to it. Me neither. But within the superhero genre, I must say the Spider-Man films tend to rise above when I compare them to all of the other superheroes out there. That's true. So these three films were extremely successful. They generated more than two and a half billion dollars at the box office. And the first two films were triumphs, both critically and commercially. And the third film, well, we don't talk about the third film, as is explained in this movie. So in a very gross oversimplification of a very fascinating and dicey corporate history that we will get into when we cover Iron Man, across the 2000s, Marvel was seeing that its characters were succeeding at the box office, but they were getting less and less input in these movies that were being made by studios that were licensing the characters for them. So they strike out on their own in 2004. They're backed by Merrill Lynch. They get $525 million, and they're supposed to make more or less 10 films over eight years. And the characters that they have, Ant-Man, The Avengers, Black Panther, Captain America, Cloak and Dagger, Doctor Strange, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, Power Pack, and Shang-Chi. They regained the rights to Hulk in 2006, followed by Thor and Black Widow. But of course, Lizzie, it was the rights to what debonair playboy that really changed the game for Marvel? Tony Stark, aka Iron Man. Aka the man Elon Musk's wishes he were. Yes. Yes. 2008's Iron Man was an enormous success. Incredibly fun movie. And in 2009, Disney acquired Marvel for $4 billion, which was quite the turnaround for Marvel Entertainment. But Lizzie Spider-Man was far from home. This podcast is supported by Bilt. Guys, I'll be honest, I don't love paying rent, and I'm guessing you don't either. But Bilt makes it feel a little easier. Bilt is the loyalty program for renters that rewards you monthly with points and exclusive benefits in your neighborhood. Let me explain. With Bilt, every rent payment earns you points that can be used toward flights, hotels, lift rides, Amazon purchases, and so much more. And here's something I'm really excited about. Now, Built members can earn points on mortgage payments for the first time. That means all you homeowners can get rewarded wherever you live and unlock exclusive benefits from more than 45,000 restaurants, fitness studios, pharmacies, and other neighborhood partners. Personally, I'd redeem my points for a little flight to get out of town and maybe pay for a babysitter to stay with my kids. It's simple. Paying rent is better with Built And now owning a home can be better with Bilt too Earn rewards and get something back wherever you live Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbilt slash rong That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash rong. Make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Now, back in the late 2000s, Sony did announce that Sam Raimi would helm a fourth Spider-Man movie. The third Spider-Man, we all make fun of it. It has weird jazz scenes. It has him like weirdly dancing down the sidewalk. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it made an insane amount of money. It seems like Raimi and his co-collaborators just could not crack the story. Maybe the studio got, you know, cold feet. Who knows? In January of 2010, Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios say, we're going to do a reboot. We're not going to do another Sam Raimi one. It's time to bring Spider-Man back to his roots. It's time to do the real Spider-Man. All right, people. Let's do this one last time. My name is Jack Kirby. I'm a comic book artist. Maybe you've heard of me, no? Well, I made Captain America, and you've probably heard of him. Back in 1962, Stan Lee asked me to help him figure out this Spider-Man guy. I didn't just draw. I laid out the story. Basically, everything but the dialogue. I guess they'd call this the Marvel method, but Marvel didn't even exist yet. Anyway, I wrote a draft. Five pages about a teenager with a magic ring that transformed him into a superhero with a web-shooting gun. That's Spider-Man. I was busy, so I got back to my other work. But the real Spider-Man? That was all me. So Lizzie, the title, The Amazing Spider-Man, was pulled from the mainstream continuity of the Marvel comics. That's in the Marvel world, The Amazing Spider-Man. That's the mainstream continuity. And I think maybe this was a signal from Sony that this was the real Spider-Man. Marvel, back off. I know you're making a lot of movies. We have the real Spider-Man. They hired Mark Webb, who'd done 500 Days of Summer, to direct the next installment. And that May, The Hollywood Reporter announced the frontrunners for Peter Parker. Jamie Bell. That makes a lot of sense. Alden Ehrenreich. Sure. Frank Delane. Josh Hutcherson. And Andrew Garfield. There's one tall man in that crowd. Yes. That doesn't belong there. And he's the one that chooses. But a particularly vocal group of fans had a different idea. Lizzie, do you remember any actor getting a lot of buzz about maybe being Spider-Man around this time? No, I don't. So following this announcement, writer Mark Bernadine penned an article in which he wrote, the last thing Spider-Man should be is another white guy. And the point he made was a poor kid from Brooklyn, New York, or Queens, or wherever we happen to be from, would more likely be a person of color. Yeah. So commenters on this article suggested community star and former 30 Rock writer... That's right. Donald Glover. Yes, I do remember this. That would have been really fun. The idea caught fire. And Donald Glover was interested. He retweeted his support of the campaign, which he did not start, to be clear. Yeah. Saying, I don't want to just be given the role. I want to be able to audition. I truly love Spider-Man. Hashtag Donald for Spider-Man. The post went viral, but to no avail. Donald Glover did not get an audition for Peter Parker. Andrew Garfield won the role. But the idea of a black Spider-Man set off this firestorm of a debate online. And a lot of it was pretty racist. Was Spider-Man's whiteness something necessary to his characters? A lot of people were saying, look, man, I'm not racist. I'm just into continuity and he should be white. And then a lot of people were saying he wears a mask for a reason. It doesn't matter what he looks like underneath. That's the whole point of the character. Yes. And somebody that agreed with that was comic book writer Brian Bendis. He was inspired specifically by that campaign, Donald for Spider-Man, and Dan Harmon's decision to put Donald Glover in a Spider-Man costume in the season two premiere of Community as a wink to that campaign. Now, Bendis wasn't only inspired by Donald Glover, he also references a conversation he had with one of his friends. This friend told Bendis that growing up, Spider-Man was the only superhero that other kids let him play because, quote, you couldn't see his skin color. He was any of us when he was in costume. End quote. Sad, but also I'm glad he had Spider-Man. So Miles Morales debuted in August of 2011 in Ultimate Fallout number four. He was created by Bendis and artist Sarah Picelli, along with input from editor Axel Alonso. He's of Afro-Puerto Rican descent. Shout out to all of our Boricua listeners. Hello to my mom's family. He is the first Black Spider-Man and the second Spider-Man of Latino descent after Spider-Man 2099 from the early 1990s. Meanwhile, Andrew Garfield takes on the mantle with Sony in The Amazing Spider-Man, and the Sony hack reveals that Donald Glover never stood a chance. Okay, so among all of these leaked emails, Lizzie, there were a lot of messages between executives at Sony and executives at Disney and Marvel about the future of Spider-Man, including a detailed licensing agreement, which stated, Peter Parker must be, quote, Caucasian and heterosexual, and that he is not a homosexual unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual, end quote. Okay, wait. So this is coming from Marvel? Yes. Okay. Now, the stipulation, I believe what it's saying is basically, you are not allowed to deviate from the continuity of the comics for Peter Parker specifically. You cannot divert from the comics in terms of representation. You may want to make a Black Spider-Man. You cannot make a Black Spider-Man until and if and when the comics have made a Black Spider-Man. And I'm specifically referring to Peter Parker's Spider-Man, not Miles Morales, which already exists. So let's swing over to late April 2014, just a few days before The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was released. Sony PR circulates an article from The Wrap internally. Here's the quote. While Marvel and DC's heroes have recently dominated theaters, the wall crawler ain't what he used to be at the domestic box office. Franchise fatigue could be setting in. Every Spider-Man film has made less in the U.S. than the one that preceded it. Sony is betting big, already having set two more Spidey movies for 2016 and 2018. A major part of the strategy is that Spidey appears to be spinning a wider web at the overseas box office. And the studio believes that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will top the $490 million that 2012's Amazing Spider-Man brought in internationally. Now, that did happen. The movie did very well internationally. It made over $500 million. But the article was right. Domestic box office, domestic interest in Spider-Man was falling with every movie. And that's got to be a little nerve-wracking when you're spending increasing amounts of money on these movies. Yes. And I also think you made a really good point in terms of all of the prior and even eventually Tom Holland, but all of the prior iterations of Spider-Man, they are tonally basically identical. And that's something that I think has not been the case with, you know, obviously I'm jumping over to DC, but something like Batman, where we now understand that that franchise is basically going to be reinvented with every new director that they hand it to. And it's going to look different. It's going to feel different. He's going to have potentially even different elements of his backstory. That's not the case with Spider-Man. So it makes sense that you're getting Diminishing Returns because as good as all those actors are and all those movies are totally serviceable, you are kind of seeing the same thing regurgitated over and over again. I agree. It also didn't help that these movies were being outperformed by their competition from Marvel at the box office. So like Captain America, Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, both of which were cheaper than The Amazing Spider-Man 2, made more at the box office. So there's an email from August 4th, 2014, which is a quote recap for meeting. It's unclear what the meeting was, but this is from Amy Pascal to Doug Belgrad. And so I'll just read the bullet points. One, our world has changed. With Disney buying Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars, they left the rest of us in the dust. But it is worse for us than others. Two, we are at a further disadvantage than some of the other companies because we don't have a robust library like Fox with remakes like Planet of the Apes or all the monster movies like Universal. And remember, this is Universal's I think in probably the early stages of developing their dark universe idea. That wouldn't be until 2017, though. Three, the franchises we do have we don't own. We have always been a studio that rented rather than owned. That would include something like Spider-Man. Columbia has never been a robust or rich company like Warner's or Universal. We don't have merch on Smurfs, and the same is going to be true of Angry Birds, which just this email is so funny. We could have bought MGM. We could have bought Marvel, but that has never been the way we have operated. Four, theme parks and animation companies, broadcast networks, companies like New Line and DreamWorks are all owned by other studios. This challenges us in our ability to compete dollar-wise in the marketplace and tentpole-wise because of corporate ownership other companies have. And then she goes on to six. When we have a summer like last summer and make two movies that have big losses, it follows us around for years because we are a pure play content company. So they say that animation and family have to be a key of our strategy going forward. It makes sense. So perhaps moving out of the big tentpole live action and moving more into Angry Birds. So, Sony decides to reach out to Marvel for help with the amazing Spider-Man 3. So, on September 12th, 2014, Rachel O'Connor sends an email called Kevin Feige Lunch Prep to several others at Sony, including Amy Pascal. It includes ideas for Spider-Woman, things to ask Feige about, and, quote, I also don't know if you ever told him about the animation idea or feel ready to, end quote. So let's talk about the animation idea. Lizzie, how familiar are you with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller? I mean, I've seen the Lego movie. It's great. Studio movies, as we know, Lizzie, are notoriously hierarchical affairs. Control is everything. These emails leaked from Sony are clearly just constant fretting about control, especially with IP. So who better to bring into this environment than the chaos agents, true monkeys with wrenches known as Lord and Miller. Let's take a little brief rewind on their origin story. So Phil Lord and Chris Miller met at Dartmouth. They had separate comics in the school newspaper. And as the story goes, they were in a tiny animation program. They were making handmade animated shorts, hand-drawn with a Bolex camera, modeled after animator Bill Plimpton's style to a certain extent. I believe Chris Miller had actually interned with Bill Plimpton. And I'm going to let Phil Lord describe their first big break because it's just, you know, something that everybody listening, if you want a big break in Hollywood, this is exactly what you should do. It's very easy to replicate. This is just, just follow this blueprint. We are the worst people to ask about how to like break into Hollywood because Chris through a series of like wacky coincidences gets a phone call in his like shithouse dorm room, which is no bigger than a queen size bed or a full size bed from some guy at Disney. And what happened was there was an article about Chris in a Dartmouth publication. Michael Eisner's son had gone to Dartmouth a couple years ahead of us, so they were always sending it to the Eisner household. Eisner somehow gets this thing, gives it to this guy Charles Hirschhorn, who's like a big exec there, who gives it to this guy Dean Valentine, who's a big TV exec, who gives it to this guy Barry Blumberg, who was like a Disney Saturday morning television exec. This supposedly happened on like the corporate jet. And by the time it gets to Barry, it goes from being like, hey, check these guys out, to being like, these are Asner's boys. You've got to get them a job. And so they call Chris and they're like, we want to fly you out. And Chris makes like two stupid mistakes, he says. Well, I have midterms. And so I'm really busy right now. And the other one is, can I bring my friend Phil? And so what happens is we like put them off for like three months. We use that as an excuse to move to California. We come out here. We have one interview that lasts five minutes. We basically think we tank it, and the next day they say, we want to give you a development deal. That's insane. Yeah. So Lorde goes on to explain that they didn't get anything on the air because everything they came up with was so weird and was way too weird to put on Saturday morning television for kids. But they generated a ton of material. He says that they pitched a new show every four weeks. Wow. So this eventually gets the attention of Steve McPherson, who's an executive at Touchstone, which, remember, is also under the Disney label. It's a distribution label under Disney. And he signs them to another two-year development deal. This would be through Touchstone TV under ABC. Again, they get nothing on the air. But they do produce a pilot called Clone High, which is supposed to air on Fox. And Fox says, no. In fact, the guy who bought it gets fired at Fox. So this pilot is dead. They enter the barren wilderness of just what they call bland sitcom wilderness at this point. And a year later, they get a phone call from MTV. And MTV says, and I'm just going to assume this is what MTV sounds like. Yo, guys, we love Clone High. It's so good. We want to do 13 episodes with you. So they put the show together and they decide they're going to embrace the weird. And this really informs their creative style. They say, we're going to say yes to the strangeness that other people bring. Whatever weird ideas they bring, like, let's embrace that. So Clone High goes on the air in 2002. Lord and Miller are officially on the map, and then the show is canceled after one season. There is a very controversial depiction of Gandhi. I'm not sure if you remember in the first season of Clone High. Yes. And he gets beat up. And there were actually hunger strikes in India in response to this show. Oops. MTV had to apologize to India. The show is canceled. Lord and Miller have established themselves again as chaos agents. So then they get hired to tackle Cloudy with a chance of meatballs for Sony Animation. This is a book without characters or a story. They come on, they're like, oh, let's make it like Deep Impact, like Armageddon, it's going to be so good. They then get fired. They then come back on when the directors that they were working with get fired. They get fired a lot, which I love. They get fired a lot. They just keep coming back. And then they're brought back in and the producer that they're working with introduces them to the crew that the old directors who got fired trying to fix their broken script have hired. So it's like not exactly a very welcoming room. And I'll let Phil Lord again describe an important learning from this moment of turmoil. We had no credibility. And our producer says, OK, this is your first meeting of the day. Tell the crew how you're going to fix the movie. Like, well, I'm just trying to figure out my parking space. I don't know exactly. What do you guys think? That was the pivotal point of the entire film. because it turns out, and I didn't know this at the time, but that being a director isn't just about mercilessly imposing your creative will on others. It is in large part about enabling the creativity of others, about creating the conditions for innovation. And when we threw out that script, what we did is we invited all these ideas in, and believe me, it was so chaotic. So they learn that everybody can have great ideas and that they need to invite the chaos in to the house if they're going to make a great movie. Have you seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs? I have not. Oh, you should watch it. It's really fun. This movie was a hit, critically and commercially. And then they are just on a tear. 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street. But of course, Liz, you mentioned it. Perhaps most importantly to this story, which big IP movie did they helm? The Lego movie. But, you know, I hadn't really put it together that their entire career up to this point and continuing with this is that they are able to reinvent massive IP franchises. That's right. Some of which are often extremely dead, like 21 Jump Street. Even Clone High is kind of that. They're reinventing dead historical figures. You know what I mean? It's reworking something that's been stale for a long time. So the Lego movie, like you just pointed out so well, Izzy, it suggests that their creative approach could work with literally the most rigid type of property. So Sony actually pursued Lord and Miller, I believe, for Ghostbusters first. That makes sense. But it doesn't seem like they were that interested. And so as early as May of 2014, they're in discussions with both of them about Spider-Man. So here's an email from Hannah Minghella to Amy Pascal. This is from May of 2014. I did talk to Phil this evening who sounded excited. He had a lot of smart questions. This is about an animated Spider-Man. Would it be PG-13? Would it be primarily for fans or for the broadest possible audience? How violent could it be? He pitched one funny idea. What if Peter Parker isn't the youngest superhero anymore? What if there's a new kid on the block? Just spitballing, but it was fun too. May 22nd, two days later. This is again Minghella and Pascal back and forth. Minghella, they would like to take the long weekend to delve into the research. I told them that was fine. Pascal, clearly nervous. Are they going to do it, though? Minghella, I think so. I hope so. Pascal versus Ghostbusters. Minghella, way more likely than Ghostbusters. And it was more likely than Ghostbusters. So according to these emails, Sony closes with Lord and Miller in August of 2014 with a targeted release date for this animated Spider-Man movie of June of 2018. And according to Lord and Miller, they have two conditions. One was he. They wanted to tell the story of Miles Morales, not Peter Parker. Hell yeah. And they wanted to use animation to, quote, tell a story in a way that has never been seen, in a way that makes you feel like you are walking inside a living comic book. They did it. And as Rodney Rothman later put it, they said, we want it to be about Miles and we want it to be crazy. Now, Lizzie, as we discussed in the interview, for Amy Pascal, things were about to get crazy. So on October 10th, 2014, these emails reveal that Marvel or Sony has basically, they've approached each other with a potential scenario where Marvel would produce a new trilogy of Spider-Man movies. Sony would retain creative control, marketing, distribution. Maybe this could be something of interest. On October 23rd, an exec in Sony's legal department wrote in reference to the studio's relationship with Marvel, hostile does not even begin to cover the relationship. And at the end of October 2014, there was a meeting between Pascal and Marvel president Kevin Feige, where Pascal basically said, Kevin, can you help us? We need help with The Amazing Spider-Man 3. These movies seem to be losing ground domestically. And Feige said, why don't you let us do it? Don't think of it as two studios. Don't think of it as a studio giving another studio back the rights. Just engage us to produce it. Just pretend it's like what DC did with Christopher Nolan. I'm not saying we're Nolan, but I am saying there is a production company that is doing this pretty well. Just engage the services of that production company to make the movie. And then Amy Pascal said, I think I started crying and I threw him out of my office. And they both agree that she may or may not have thrown a sandwich at him And to be clear what basically happening here is you have one executive Amy Pascal who has helmed you know successfully two of these movies and The Amazing Spider and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did very well, but they are losing to Marvel. And you have her rival saying, look, you guys can take the money, you can take the credit, but just admit we're better at this than you. So you should let us do it. And that would be pretty hard to hand over the baby like that. Yeah. So they both agree that this might be sandwich throwing aside the right decision. It wouldn't matter. Following the Sony hack, Pascal announced on February 5th that she was stepped down from her position in May. She was effectively fired. And four days later, Sony announced that Spider-Man would appear in Marvel's cinematic universe. Lizzie, the amazing Spider-Man was dead. Let's talk about the real Spider-Man. All right, people, let's start at the beginning one last time. My name is Steve Ditko, and back in the day, I saved Spider-Man. After Jack Kirby botched the job, Stan Lee gave me a crack at it. My style was quirkier, a bit more realistic, and Kirby made the guy look like the fly, that Archie Comics character. The costume? That was all me. The guy clings so he can't have hard shoes or boots, and I gave him a hidden wrist shooter instead of a gun. But the key was the mask. I didn't think Stan would like the idea of covering the guy's face, but I thought, he's a kid. He needs to hide his youth. It also adds mystery and maybe allows the reader to become the personality behind the mask. The real Spider-Man? That was all me. All right, over at Sony, Lizzie, the last Spider-Man standing, was Phil Lord. So he dove into the script. From the beginning, he included elements that hinted at the animation style they wanted to use. The original pass had word balloons and pow's and bangs. Lord said, it was like the first call was to the production designer going, I think we can make a movie with multiple animation styles, all living in the same frame at the same time. And he's like, no, you're never going to get away with that. And it was like, I'm going to write it, so we have to do it that way. End quote. That production designer was Justin K. Thompson, who they had worked with on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Miller said they wanted to make a movie that really paid tribute to the comics in a way that felt like you were going inside a living, breathing comic book. But Lizzie, it couldn't be a straight adaptation. They needed Miles to collide with two Peter Parkers, The Chris Pine version, the best version, the perfect version of Spider-Man. And after he dies, the failed amalgam of every version Lord and Miller had grown up with, Peter B. Parker. And how can we make such a collision occur with a particle collider, which would open up what now ubiquitous concept in this world, Lizzie? The multiverse. The multiverse. Multiverse. Now, multiverses were percolating in the zeitgeist. Were you a community fan, Lizzie? I didn't really watch it regularly. Well, it's great. And Donald Glover was part of a multiverse before this multiverse existed. He was part of a multiverse in Community, Remedial Chaos Theory, an episode from the third season. Very fun episode. And Spider-Man was part of a multiverse too. Specifically, the Spider-Verse line of comics, which debuted in November of 2014. Created by Dan Slott, the 2014 Spider-Verse event was supposedly inspired by a Spider-Man video game, Shattered Dimensions, which he wrote the story for. But I do want to mention John Semper Jr., writer and producer of the Spider-Man animated series from the 90s, felt that he was actually responsible for the concept with a two part episode called Spider Wars, which also featured a Spider-Verse. A lot of credit disputes in these properties. Now, regardless of who made the Spider-Verse, Lorde needed to figure out which Spider-Men and women and pigs he was going to fill it with. Which of the other spiders do you think came first after Miles Morales and Peter Parker? I would guess Gwen Stacy, but I don't know. Boo, boo, boo, boo, boo. Very good. Great guess. That was their first choice, Spider Gwen. Gwen Stacy from another universe. She was introduced in Edge of Spider-Verse 2. They just thought that look, the colors, the design. Yeah, she's great. Oh, the style. So aspirational and cool. They said it was a no brainer. Yeah. So in December of 2015, Sony announces that a planned summer 2018 release date for Spider-Verse had pushed to December because Phil Lord is still scribbling, scribbling, scribbling all over all of the notes everywhere and that they'd hired a director, Bob Persichetti. He was an animator and writer, and this was going to be his directorial debut. His last produced project was The Little Prince for Netflix in 2015. He'd co-written that script and he'd been the head of the animation department. And actually, at this point in time, Lizzie, he was trying to bring a different form of IP to the screen. The incredibly cinematic, just loaded with story, Playmobil franchise. What now? Well, Sony had seen the Lego movie and they thought, come on, guys. Everybody knows the cool kids play Playmobil. I don't even know what a Playmobil is. You don't know Playmobil? No, what is it? It's like bigger Legos. Okay. It was like Legos for younger kids. Lego for younger kids. Excuse me. What? That project fell apart, pun intended. And Sony came to him and said, well, what do you think about Spider-Man? And he said, well, I haven't really been thinking about Spider-Man. They said, look, Lord and Miller are doing it. Will you read the treatment? But before he read the treatment, he turned to Lord and Miller and said, why make another Spider-Man movie? Exactly your question, Lizzie. And they said, because it's not about Spider-Man. It's about Miles Morales. And also, we've got Spider-Ham. Yes. Now, Peter Porker is a real Marvel character. Introduced in November of 1983 in Marvel Tales starring Peter Porker, the spectacular Spider-Ham, number one. That's amazing. Like, that alone is... It has to be in. Amazing. He was a simple spider living in a world of anthropomorphic animals. He was bit by an irradiated porcine scientist. he becomes an anthropomorphic pig with spider abilities. That scientist got confused and came to believe she was his aunt. Her name is May. It is so nuts. I love it. So Persichetti comes on in December of 2015, and there is no script. He said, quote, I think we had a loose first act that Phil had been pecking away on. And then over the next six months, we had a full draft and we were boarding simultaneously and getting stuff up on reels. All right. Now, Spider-Man Noir also debuted before the Spider-Verse event took place, but he also took part in the Spider-Verse event. He's very much an homage to the Spider, the original inspiration for Stanley's Spider-Man. Got it. As well as a character like the Spirit and other pulp noir heroes. Penny Parker was first introduced in Marvel's Edge of Spider-Verse number five, part of a miniseries in 2014. And she kind of draws on a history of Spider-Man in Japanese media, especially. There was like a 1970 manga series, a 1978 TV series. And these are specifically Japanese Spider-Man properties. And her backstory in the comics is based on this 1990s Japanese TV mecha anime series that I used to watch called Neon Genesis Evangelion. Have you ever seen that, Lizzie? It's like a kind of interesting Gundam style mecha anime show. You would recognize it if you saw it. And what's interesting is that she looks a little different than in the comics. I think that they are doing a bit more of a hybridization with something like Sailor Moon, for example, in the final version of this. Yeah. And they went through a lot of different iterations of her character. In 2016, not one but two more directors joined the movies. Peter Ramsey, who'd worked with Prisicetti on several projects. So he was working on another project for Abhi Arad, and Prisicetti calls him up and says, hey, can you do some boards on this movie? And the work just grew and grew and grew. And as we know on these movies, Lizzie, animated films almost always have multiple directors, usually at least two. Now, you may be wondering why Lord and Miller weren't directing this movie. Lizzie, do you know what other enormous property they had been hired to helm? Yeah, I have to imagine this is Han Solo time. Boo-boo! I don't know what Han Solo's name is. Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da! Well, in this case, it's like... Yeah, so on July 7th of that year, 2016, Lord and Miller were announced as the directors of the standalone Solo, a Star Wars story film for Lucasfilm. So the third director that comes on to Spider-Verse is Rodney Rothman. Basically, he was first hired to write. Lord was MIA because of Solo, and they needed more work on the script. Rodney Rothman had written on the Jump Street movies. I believe he is the credited writer on 22 Jump Street. He had been hesitant to join. Again, why are we making another Spider-Man movie? But Lorde said, just read the script. It's a really short 175 pages. So he dives in. Five pages in, he's intrigued. 30 pages in, he makes a note. This is really cool. It gets a lot messier, but he's hooked. So he says yes. Eventually, he asks to be a co-director. And what really sold him was the early conversations and conceptualizations about the look of the film. He's thinking like, this is so cool. But then he tells himself, don't let on how cool you think this is because they need to think that they need you. Now, Rodney Rothman later said that there were, quote, infinite drafts. Ramsey described it as a constant process of honing in one thing, chipping down the statue to get to the statue underneath. Now, let's talk about some material that was cut from the script before animation began. So you can read this online. And by the way, the dead Peter Parker, the Chris Pine one, the good one, is referred to in the screen direction as R.I. Peter. It's pretty funny. So Lorde said, there was a point in the draft where the spider people kept showing up and just being there. Sorry, guys, I'm late. And then Australian Spider-Man showed up at one point and was immediately killed. So Australian Spider-Man is described as Pita Paka, P-I-T-A-H. Of course. And so he dies because he arrives and they only have 24 hours until they disintegrate. But Australia is one day ahead. And so when he arrives, he dies immediately. So he just dies right away. That's pretty funny. There was also a scene involving all of the actors who had played Peter Parker or Spider-Man in the live action movies. I'm kind of surprised they didn't do that. This would be Tom Holland, Andrew Garfield, and Tobey Maguire, which was eventually done in Spider-Man No Way Home. Yeah. So Rothman said there was a whole period of time, and this is going to bring us into our favorite director on what went wrong. There was a whole period of time where Miles, rather than learning about being Spider-Man from a comic book, learned it from watching the movies. And we were going to have a movie version of a movie about Spider-Man in Miles's universe about the real person Spider-Man, but it was a James Cameron directed movie with Tom Cruise as Spidey. And it was James Cameron and Spidey Tom Cruise on the director's commentary. So it was going to be like real James Cameron and Tom Cruise doing the director's commentary of that Spider-Man movie. But Tom Cruise was actually real Spider-Man. Like that was the joke. He was a real Spider-Man and they had made a movie about him anyway. Okay. Yeah, which of course ties into the rumors in the 90s that James Cameron was going to direct Spider-Man, if you guys remember from our other coverage. The thing about a multiverse that we've all learned is that it is extremely unstable. And in 2020, Phil Lord tweeted photos of big whiteboards covered in notes, calling it the story wheel of Spider-Verse. And he revealed, we did a big shakeup of the story less than a year from release on an animated film. And we had to figure out how to reshape sequences we had already boarded and animated and fold them in with new stuff. Oh, and we rebroke the whole third act. Lizzie, can I show you these nightmare fuel whiteboards? Please. So that is them re-breaking the story at the last minute. A lot of little words, a lot of little letters. You know, it's less Pepe Sylvia than I expected it, by the way you set it up, to be honest. That's true. That's true. That's fair. There's not as much red yarn as you might have been expecting. Yeah, there could be more. So simultaneous to all of this, they're developing the look and feel of the film. And this is a process that took a year and a half. The pre-production team was at Sony Pictures Animation in Culver City, and the production team was at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver, which is a non-union studio. So as we mentioned from the beginning, they wanted to take a bunch of animation styles and mash them together and still have it feel cohesive. Lizzie, how would you describe the animation style of this movie? Bonkers. It's like you're seeing a hyper-realistic animation style through the lens of a page of a comic book, if that makes sense. Like there is an overlay to everything without disturbing the very heightened but real animation that you see behind it. Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it. One way that I was thinking about it, it feels entirely cohesive and yet it feels like it can see every layer at the same time. Yes. Which is really cool, right? You can see the base 3D animation layer, the painted layers, the texture layers, and then for all of the emotion, the hand-drawn portions of their faces on top of it. And every frame feels like a painting to me, more than any other movie I can really think of. So they wanted this combination to serve the story, because the story is about people from different walks of life discovering what they have in common as they all put on this mask. And as you said, Lizzie, they wanted it to mimic how it feels to read the comics. So Chris Miller said, it's the way when you read a comic book, you go, oh, this one was drawn by Sarah Pacelli, and this one is Robbie Rodriguez and Rico Renzi, and this one is Bill Sienkiewicz. The whole idea was, let's feel the artist's hand on the screen in a way we've never seen. So instead of trying to make the whole thing feel seamless so you can't differentiate one artist from the other, they said, why not just allow all of the artists to differentiate themselves through the characters and styles that we're seeing on screen? But they took a lot of creative liberties in reimagining the characters. So like Doc Ock's design, And Doc Ock was, you know, obviously redesigned as a female character in this instance. So what's really interesting about this change for Doc Ock, too, is that according to Prisicetti, he said, quote, I pitched it and they were like, no, I will say this is the one moment where I was like, why are you saying no? This is the one time where it took a long time to get certain people to come around and go, OK, it can be a female, end quote. Catherine Han's casting was, I think, pretty inspired for that as well. Yeah, definitely a precursor to WandaVision, it felt. For sure. And they were referencing movies like Particle Fever, documentaries about real scientists. Spider-Ham's design also pulled more from Mad Magazine than if you were to go back to the original Spider-Ham in the comic. In particular, art by cartoonist Sergio Aragonese and Harvey Kurtzman. And for the world, they drew inspiration from other non-MCU sources, including Bill Watterson's Forest from the Calvin and Hobbes strip, which I thought was really interesting as well. And then the way the characters moved is really interesting. Did you have a little bit of a hard time at first settling into the motion of the characters of this movie at all? Not for me, no. Okay, I did at first. And I think that's actually for a couple of specific reasons. So they wanted the characters to look highly stylized, but they wanted their performances to look natural. So visual effects supervisor Danny Dimion said that Lord and Miller told him early on, they want something that when they looked at it, they either didn't understand how it was made, or they had not seen it before, or hopefully both. To which he said, no problem. They did a series of tests, including Spider-Man leaping off a building, Spider-Man swinging through the city, a more emotional close-up of Gwen Stacy. And when he was working on the Stacy test in particular, Demian had one of his other previous projects in mind. Quote, I had worked on the Polar Express, so it reminded me of how hard it is to do stylized children and women characters who have very subtle features and don't have a lot of detail and don't have a lot of sculpture to actually work with. I think this is where adding the line drawing of the face on top of the model comes into play. Yeah, that makes sense. It's super effective. So the three tests they had done looked too smooth. And the team makes three big decisions as a result. These are the elements that at first, it's not that I found them jarring. It just took me a minute to settle in. Number one, they would not use motion blur. So normally you would use motion blur so that when an object is in motion, you don't see the harshness of its outline, for example. Number two, they would animate most of the film, quote, on twos, which means at 12 frames per second. So there's a bit of a jittery quality to the motion of the characters in this movie because you're seeing half the standard number of frames that you're used to. And number three, they said they would draw expression lines over the CG faces to add emotion. Prisicetti remembers, when we decided to strip out motion blur, the people at Imageworks said, that's not going to work. You won't be happy. We said, no, that's the goal. Make us unhappy. Then figure out a new way to make us happy. The way that they are setting up these goals would be mind boggling to work with. Absolutely infuriating. Yeah. So another big influence on the look of this film came from visual consultant and production designer who was hired early on, Albert Mielgo. Now, he was working on this short film called The Windshield Wiper. He was working on this a couple of years before he joined Sony for Spider-Man. And he says he, quote, worked on the short on and off during my time there. So I took things from one and into the other and vice versa. Even the look of animating in twos was highly influenced by the windshield wiper, which had that idea first. And if you guys go online and look up the short, the windshield wiper, you'll see that the style is very evocative of Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse. They had their style. Now they needed the voices to bring them to life. So cast announcements were made from the spring of 2017 through the fall of 2018. Let's start with Miles Morales. So according to casting director Mary Hidalgo, she and the directors considered roughly 350 actors for the role of Miles Morales, including another star of Atlanta. Funny that Donald Glover has already come up because Lakeith Stanfield was considered. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. I think his voice is just a little too low. He absolutely has the right personality. He does not sound like a kid. I love Lakeith Stanfield. I just think his voice sounds a little too low. Shameik Moore had been a huge fan of Miles Morales, he says, since when he first saw him in a cartoon on TV. And it is technically possible, although I don't think it's likely, that this version or a version of Miles Morales he saw was actually voiced by Donald Glover. So four years after hashtag Donald for Spider-Man, Glover voiced the webbed hero in Disney's Ultimate Spider-Man Web Warriors. And so, again, I think that he saw the earlier version of the cartoon personally, just based on the timeline, but it's technically possible. Shameik Moore didn't get the job on the spot. According to Moore, the directors asked him to record himself on his phone and then text the recording to co-director Bob Persichetti. I think he probably figured like, oh, they're texting him. Like, they'll get back to me soon. Six months later, they came back and according to Moore said, yep, you're the one. Now, Lizzie, if you had to guess which character was written for the actor that ended up playing them in this movie. It's gotta be Spider-Man noir. It's not Spider-Ham. No? I have no idea. Peter B. Parker was written for Jake Johnson. Oh, I love that. Come on, the world's most burned out Spider-Man? Nick Miller! You really only have one option. There's only one option. And he was a Lord and Miller regular to a certain extent. He'd been in the Lego movie in 21 Jump Street, plays the principal in 21 Jump Street, if you don't remember. Yeah. He was thrilled. He was a little worried that the movie was going to start with the death of Spider-Man and the perfect Spider-Man. Then he was going to play like the shitty replacement Spider-Man. But he believed Lord and Miller would make it work. Brian Tyree Henry, another Atlanta star, thought he was too young at 36 to play the dad of a teenage son. But then he learned that he would be playing the dad not of Peter Parker but Miles Morales And he was in And Brian Tyree Henry great in this And also he is fantastic He is so so good I love him Good Lord he good A couple more fun casting facts. According to Rodney, turning Doc Ock into a woman was a Prisicetti idea. He and Catherine Hahn are friends through their kids. And in earlier drafts, Lizzie, she was a big Lebowski-type dude, which I do think it works much better, the Catherine Hahn-type opposite the enormous kingpin, as opposed to a Lebowski-type dude. Yeah, totally. Nicolas Cage was Mary Hidalgo's idea, casting director, the dream get for her. And he was friends with Amy Pascal. And so that's how they signed him onto the movie. He's great in this. And it's also, I think maybe because you can't see his face as Nick Cage. It's like one of the few times where a Nick Cage surprise cameo really works, I think. I agree. It's not distracting. It adds to the movie. The running Rubik's Cube colorblind joke is really funny. It's very funny. All right. So during production, everything is happening all at once. animation, voice acting, writing, editing. There were 140 animators working on the movie. Prisicetti has actually said at one point it was closer to 170. And according to Miller, it took one week to animate every one second of the movie, which is apparently very slow. The standard, again, according to Miller, is four or more seconds per week. And that's because art director Patrick O'Keefe said, in effect, we ended up making five movies because they kept going back and changing things. Oh, God. According to Lorde, ultimately, Peter Ramsey was the action guy, Rothman was the comedy guy, and Persichetti was the poet. But all of the directors have said that there was a ton of overlap. And this is different than a more traditional approach of where you're going to assign separate sequences to each director, which if you remember is something that happened on Trek, for example, which we discussed. Right. Lead editor Robert Fisher Jr. said, as we went along, the screenplay was evolving. Some of the storyboard artists would event scenes and sequences and show them to the directors and get a pitch. We would come up with an idea and talk about it with the directors and say, let's give it a try. If you remember the Lord and Miller style of all ideas seem to be welcome. Let's just try all these things. Let's throw it at the wall. See what sticks. Prisicetti said, honestly, our animators were averaging a foot of animation a week, which is like really bad. Again, I don't think this is because the animators were working slow. I think it's because they are pioneering a new animation style with a story that is not locked. at all. And a lot of the voice performances were shaping the animation, and a lot of the actors had never done voiceover performance before. So like Mahershala Ali, for example, as Uncle Aaron, Rothman says that in a lot of the takes that they selected, things were being left unsaid because he was doing a more emotional method performance as opposed to a bigger, more traditional animated performance. But then they started seeing what the animators were sending back and what they were doing with the things that weren't being said or what they were doing in the moments when people were saying nothing. And that changed the way they were writing the movie. And I think that is such a key point. One of the reasons I think Miles works so well in this movie, they don't have him talk that much. Yeah, it's true. I mean, a lot of this movie could play as not a silent film, but a wordless film to a certain extent. The visuals are so powerful. A lot of the sequences of him and Peter B. Parker, it's Jake Johnson running his motor mouth, which is what he's great at, obviously. But I think the animators do such a good job of bringing the emotions of Miles Morales to the screen. Definitely. Now, Moore did at first try to sound 14 and he tried to raise his voice and they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Like, just do your normal voice. It's fine. And I actually think that one of the reasons my suspicion is they do the song at the beginning. If you remember, Lizzie, the song he's singing at the beginning of the film where he's like doing a falsetto. I think that part of the reason they start with that is to ease out of the falsetto into his normal voice to help you buy that he's a kid. Because Shamik Moore was what, like in his mid-20s? 20, yeah, I think early 20s at this point. Okay. So it took 10 weeks to put the first cut of the film together, and the entire process from storyboarding to the final cut was two and a half years. And apparently 10 minutes of the movie were ultimately cut, which is, according to Persichetti, a big chunk to end up on the cutting room floor for an animated movie. Yes. And it included, Lizzie, a very dark joke that I think you're going to think is really funny. Okay. Here it goes. The way that the scene, this is the scene in the dorm room where all of the spider people are saying that they've lost someone. Noir said he lost his uncle Benjamin. Peter lost his uncle Ben. Gwen lost Peter. We went through everyone, Rothman said. And then Spiderham said he lost his uncle frankfurter and then he said he was electrocuted and it smelled so good should have stayed the joke killed but they cut it because it was quote a bad laugh and it was throwing off the energy in the scene spider-man is a real person with real feelings and we wanted people to get that and this is a key difference in my opinion from deadpool for example yeah which is they don't go for the bad laugh. They respect the emotions. Yeah, nothing is at the character's expense, I wouldn't say. No, not at all. I think this movie leans away from the easy humor when it needs to. Yes. If they can go to heart instead of humor, they go to heart. And I like that they have that preference. And again, it still has very funny, the goober joke is still like one of my favorite jokes, like the new version of a MacGuffin. There's an amazing Looney Tunes joke. Yes. Is he legally allowed to say that? Or when he gives him the mallet and he says, Spider-Ham gives him the mallet and says, it'll fit in your pocket. Yeah. This enormous mallet. There's so many great jokes. Now, Lizzie, did you notice the Donald Glover cameo? No. Blink and you'll miss it. It's in Prowler's, Uncle Aaron's apartment. Donald Glover in that episode of Community wearing his Spider-Man pajamas is on the television. Oh. Which I think is a really fun homage. Do we know why they didn't consider, I mean, he was busy at this point. but why he wasn't considered at all. I think he also sounds too old. That's true. He's substantially older. And yeah, and so even when you listen to him as Miles Morales in the web series, basically what it was from 2014, he sounds older than Shamik Moore at that point by a decent amount. He does play Uncle Aaron or Aaron Davis in Spider-Man Homecoming, and he also has a cameo as a version of Prowler in Across the Spider-Verse, the second Spider-Verse movie. So he's very much in these movies, you know, and he also may have been busy. You mentioned the Nick Cage performances, Lizzie, really quickly. They were apparently just writing more and more lines because they just loved that they had Nick Cage and they were just like, let's get him to say these things. Let's get him to, you know, and they were just looking up like the weird, old-timey 1930s slang that he was using. And apparently they gave him one line, didn't look it up. It was some old-timey slang that they found. They fully animated the scene and then somebody bothered to look it up after they fully animated it. And it was like a wildly pornographic reference that ended up having to change after the fact. I don't know what the line was. They just mentioned it on stage. That's amazing. So the last scene that came together was the first shot that we see of Miles at his artboard because the song that he's singing, Sunflower, was still being written at the time. So the movie was finally released, Lizzie, on December 14th, 2018. And thankfully, nobody was asking, why make another Spider-Man movie? The New York Times called it a fresh take on a venerable hero and said it contains a vital element that has been missing from too many recent superhero movies, fun. The Chicago Tribune said, maybe we just needed this dangerously familiar mythology to find the right animated incarnation to make it feel fresh. The LA Times said that on paper, the movie sounds entirely superfluous, but to my chagrin, it's terrific. Critics grouped it together with movies like The Incredibles 2, The Lego Movie, and they set it apart from other MCU and DC movies, like Avengers Infinity War and Justice League. And of course, they celebrated the animation. The characters feel liberated by animation. And the audience will too. Old-style graphic techniques co-mingle with digital wizardry. Wiggly lines indicate the tingling of spider senses, while electronic bursts signal the presence of interdimensional static. The rules of visual coherence are tested, and ultimately upheld while the laws of physics are flouted with sublime bravado. It goes for bright, nimble illustration, not quite 2D, not quite the clinical digital product we're all too used to consuming. Watching it is like flipping through your favorite Spider-Man spinoff comics while you're on your third Mountain Dew. It's a lot of Mountain Dew, my friend. Too much, yes. Now, the movie was screened in both 2D and 3D, and some of the design choices that I think we love actually did cause some confusion initially among the audiences that watched the movie in 2D. There were scenes where parts of the screen were blurred, and there were these colorful dots, they're called Ben Day dots, that you see in printed comic books. And on social media, people were confused by these elements, and some people thought that their theater had actually screened the 3D version and forgotten to provide them with 3D glasses to watch But none of it really seemed to matter because audiences flocked to this movie. The movie generated somewhere just shy of $400 million, depending on the source, against its $90 million budget. Wow. Which I should mention, $90 million is a very slim budget for an animated feature film at this point in time. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 2019 Academy Awards. Peter Ramsey, who had been the first Black filmmaker to direct a big budget animated feature with Rise of the Guardians in 2012, became the first Black filmmaker to win the Animated Feature Academy Award. It also won an award for its title sequence, which is great. And did you notice the production code authority, the comic authority stamp of approval at the beginning? It's very fun. But Lizzie, with chaos, comes a cost. So in June of 2017, it was reported that Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired from Solo, A Star Wars Story. We will cover this movie. Yes, we will. It's a wild ride. Rumors persisted that their approach to filmmaking led to production delays and clashes with the studio's vision for the film. Was their vision fun? Let's wait until we can hear from Ron Howard on that. I'm not sure. Okay. Before Into the Spider-Verse's sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, was completed, 100 artists left that project. Four of them spoke with Vulture about what they described as an unsustainable work environment. They called it Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts. They reported seven-day work weeks, 11-hour days, and returning to the drawing board four and five times during the final rendering stage, redoing things. Oh. Now, it's also possible that this was in part due to the fact that Sony Pictures Imageworks remained a non-union animation house. Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse was released in 2023 to greater success than the first film. As I mentioned, it features a cameo by Donald Glover. Now, originally, the third Spider-Verse movie was scheduled to be released on March 29th, 2024, less than a year after Across the Spider-Verse debuted. But that timeline, it seems, was always unrealistic given the crazy demands of the animation style and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller presumably's tendency to change things. So over time, this release date moved to June 4th, 2027, June 25th, and now it's slated for June 18th, 2027. We will see if that date holds. But I have to say it is possible that many of the animators on this project, although they created something wonderful, were very much burned out by the process. of making this movie. And so I do want to highlight that although I think this movie is a creative masterpiece in so many ways, it was born very much through the blood, sweat, and tears of a lot of people who probably had to do great work not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, but maybe five times or more as those above them chased a better and better movie. And that's definitely a delicate balance, right? Finding the best Spider-Man in all possible universes. But ultimately, you have to commit to a decision and take that leap of faith, as they do at the end of this movie. And there is a reason why you have to have deadlines and release dates and lockdown timelines. Because, you know, it can become an abusive work environment. I don't know if it was on this movie, but it seems like it became that on the sequel. But with that, Lizzie, I have to ask you, who's the real Spider-Man and what went right? Who's the real Spider-Man? Chris, we're all the real Spider-Man. That's the whole point. That's the... I know. I was trying to get you there. I mean, I just didn't know if you were going to get there. Of course. No. Yeah, it is. That's exactly... I could be Spider-Man if I got bitten by a radioactive spy. I'd be really bad at it. But I could be. You could be. What went right? I mean, I'm sorry to hear that it was such a chaotic process. and it sounds like it came from a good place, but I can still totally see how that would be an absolute nightmare to have to work on that many versions of something. That being said, the animation style and the way that they are able to visually capture what feels like diving into a comic book on screen is remarkable. And I would say that that went right. And then I would just say that above all, they pulled a Toy Story and they still prioritized the story above everything else. And to me, that is the ultimate what went right with this movie, because it's so good. Even in a multiverse of madness, as it were, sorry, Doctor Strange, they still managed to keep track of the most important elements of the story and have it be at its core, really like a simple story about finding yourself. And as you said, about having faith. So I think that's what went right for me. I completely agree. And as much as I'd like to give mine to Phil Lord or the directors, I would like to give my what went right to every animator artist who worked on this movie. You could take any screen grab, any frame from this movie could be a work of art on your wall. And what an achievement. And I hope that it did not come at too great a cost, but know that you have made something that I believe will endure as a testament to the power of storytelling, to the power of art, and to the power of collaboration. Yes. And this is what can happen when hundreds of extremely talented people work together, share their ideas, and put their talents toward a common goal. And so kudos to you. It's beautiful. And this movie is really something unique when it is hard to make something unique because so much has been made at this point. All right, Lizzie, that brings us to the end of our coverage of Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse. We will have many other Spider-Men and maybe someday Spider-Women to cover on this podcast. But in the meantime, can you tell people how they can support the show if they're enjoying it? Of course I can. There are many ways to support the show. You can tell a friend or family member that you like it. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever platform you're listening to this on Spotify, Apple, whatever. You can also subscribe on both Apple and Spotify if you would like to get our bonus content. We release at least one bonus episode behind the paywall every month. Usually they're reviews of upcoming new releases. It's been a really fun chance for Chris and I to just really wax poetic about upcoming new films for you to watch along with us. And you can also join our Patreon. We really only have one barrier of entry on our Patreon. That is the $5 tier. For $5, you get access to everything, including the bonus episodes, including an ad-free feed, as well as access to newsletters, posts, fan community. But for $50, you get all that and a special, special shout out from us, just like one of these. All right, let's do this one last time. My name's Chris Winterbauer. During the pandemic, I was bitten by the radioactive podcast bug. We didn't think it'd go anywhere, but for five years, my friends and I have been making your favorite podcast full stop. I'm pretty sure you know the rest. We've covered big time floppers and all time classics. We got some stuff right, got some stuff wrong, took a break to make a movie, had a kid, and started a Patreon. We didn't think anybody would sign up, but for some reason you did. And because of that, we are going to keep coming back. So this thank you goes out to the real heroes of this show. Evan Downey, Felicia G, Film It Yourself, Frankenstein, Full Greyhound, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jared, pronounced a-jen, Jason Frankel, JJ Rapido, Jory Hillpiper, Jose Emilano Salto del Giorgio, Karina Canaba, Kate Elrington, Kathleen Olson, Amy Olgeschlager-McCoy, Lazy Freddy, Lena LJ, Lydia Howes, Mark Bertha, Mary Postus Humans, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nathan Knife, Nathan Sentineau, Rosemary Southward, Rural Juror, Sadie, Just Sadie, Scott Oshita, Soman Chinani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson, The Provost Family, where the O's sound like O's, and there is no spoof. With great patrons comes great responsibility. All right, guys, thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of What Went Wrong. Lizzie, what do we have coming next week? We got a real disaster, Chris, I gotta tell you. It's a disaster so big, it can't be contained with just one simple episode. We are going to be covering Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, but we're going to do it a little bit differently. Because, as many of you may know, there is a real murder. involved in the making of The Cotton Club. So on Friday, we are going to be releasing an episode that will be focusing pretty much exclusively on that murder. Who was involved? Who did it? Who was killed? And then how does it tie into the main story? And then on Monday, you will get a regular main feed episode about The Cotton Club movie itself. Indeed. Francis Ford Coppola losing it all. It's very relevant to our times today. Thanks, guys. We look forward to seeing you next week. And as always, we are all Spider-Man. Bye. Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winnebauer and edited by Karen Krupshoff.