Every major comic book adaptation is always being designed with sequels in mind, but Dave Callaham was well ahead of the game when it came to getting the ball rolling on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2. The sequel to the Academy Award-winning original is widely regarded as one of the best superhero movies ever made, regardless of whether we’re talking about animation or live-action.
Callaham wasn’t even part of the first installment, with the screenplay credit awarded to Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, but the 43-year-old has become one of the industry’s go-to guys for writing blockbusters. His credits over the last decade have included The Expendables, Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, Wonder Woman 1984, Mortal Kombat, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and the Russo brothers’ Hercules remake, so he knows his stuff.
In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Callaham revealed that he’d already started the script for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2, which he’s co-writing with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, before the opener even hit theaters in December 2018.
“Chris and Phil said, ‘We have this animated Spider-Man movie we are doing’. They were still working on the first movie. They couldn’t tell me what it was going to look like. Because it’s them, I said, ‘I’ll come in and see what you have. I don’t get it’. They showed me an animatic, which at the time looked like napkin drawings with temp vocals and no animation styling behind it.
I could feel the heart behind it, but I couldn’t imagine how spectacular this thing could be yet. They showed me some still images of some of the art they had been working on. With them, I trust them implicitly and I believed they were going to do something special. I said, ‘Okay’, and they said, ‘Great. Pitch us a sequel’. So I began the very strange process of working on the sequel for a year before the original came out.”
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 is currently penciled in for an October 2022 debut, but so far any new casting announcements have been few and far between. That hasn’t stopped countless rumors making the rounds, though, but at least we know Callaham has had plenty of time to hammer things into shape, while Lord and Miller are two of the finest comedic filmmakers in the business, so the sequel is in very good hands.
