‘Death by a thousand paper cuts’: Even ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ wasn’t safe from Marvel’s ruthless VFX conditions

Marvel Studios has developed an unsavory reputation for overworking and underpaying its VFX artists, but it would appear that it extends to projects that don’t full under Kevin Feige’s umbrella, too, with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse reportedly placing the exact same sort of pressures on the people who worked on it.

The acclaimed superhero sequel might have cultivated an instant reputation as being every bit as good – if not better – than its Academy Award-winning predecessor, but a new report from Vulture has nonetheless exposed the conditions behind the scenes, which found artists forced into making widespread changes on a whim.

As always tends to be the case, the sources spoken to retained anonymity for the sake of their livelihoods, but it doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the development process for a blockbuster smash hit that’s supposed to have another sequel swinging into theaters in a matter of months.

“Those people are sitting there getting paid to do nothing. Because we hired a massive team of artists to accomplish the October date and then we found out it was pushed. The water behind the dam kept growing because Phil was holding off sequences. Then at a certain point, we ran out of time. The dam broke, water came flooding in, and all the departments were swamped, doing overtime.

But that didn’t stop all the changes from coming in. Things just kept getting changed and cut and redone over and over again, even though shots were getting pushed through all the departments. The whole experience felt like one step forward, two steps back, until we were forced to sprint to make up ground in the last few months. There are sequences that we started in 2021 that we just finished in May. That is a lot of artists’ hours and time and energy and stress. This production has been death by a thousand paper cuts.”

What make it more unusual is that producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have extensive animation backgrounds themselves via Clone High, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and The LEGO Movie, so they’d have been keenly aware of the time it takes to put something like Across the Spider-Verse together.

It’s an ongoing issue that the industry really needs to look into and solve, though, even if the chances of it happening continue to look slim.