With every passing day, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse looks more and more destined to end up as the comic book movie high point of the year; a distinction that’s more than just a little bit deserved when one accounts for the sheer level of heart put into it, not to mention its Academy Award-winning predecessor it stands upon the shoulders of. Indeed, Into the Spider-Verse walked so that Across the Spider-Verse could soar.
The fact that there’s still widespread doubt over the merits of animated movies after two Spider-Verse films is nothing short of catastrophically dumbfounding, and Across the Spider-Verse isn’t afraid to say that; when your animated film includes live-action sequences for the sake of a gag or a cheeky Marvel callback/cameo, it’s safe to say that a point was trying to be made.
But at the end of the day, Across the Spider-Verse is an animated movie, and going overboard with live-action bits and pieces, as directors Justin K. Thompson and Kemp Powers admitted to almost doing, would have taken away the magic. In an interview with Variety, the two helmsmen, who directed the film alongside Joaquim Dos Santos, reminisced on some of the larger live-action set pieces that didn’t make the cut, and apparently they were too embarrassing to divulge the details of.
We had even bigger ambitions. There were times when we had huge live-action sequences in the film, and it just turned into a bad joke. Even we didn’t like it anymore. And we just said, ‘OK, enough, let’s make sure that it’s something precise that gets the most bang for the buck, and speaks to the story.’
We should be wholly grateful for this decision; no live-action sequence could possibly out-do shenanigans in the stunningly gorgeous animation style that has permeated the very best of Sony Pictures Animation’s library; between the Spider-Verse films and The Mitchells vs. The Machines, Sony’s cracked a very lucrative code.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now playing in theaters.
