One of the people responsible for bringing Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to the big screen is revealing the purpose for cutting a particularly goofy cameo — and that’s quite the claim for a film that featured a Lego Spider-Man.
Across the Spider-Verse co-director Joaquim Dos Santos said a Toy-Biz action figure version of the web-head was planned at one point, complete with “a giant kid’s hand that would go off screen and hold him,” according to IGN.
However, the reason this was excluded boiled down to the character possibly reducing the initial sense of wonder and reverence the audience needed to feel through Miles Morales’ eyes when he first sees the Spider Society’s headquarters in Nueva York. As Dos Santos explained:
“We wanted to make sure Spider Society could have jokes and things like Bag-Man, but when Miles showed up you wanted to be in awe of this place […] It had to feel cool, emotionally.”
In that same interview, another one of the film’s three directors, Justin K. Thompson, explained there were a total of north of 600 different Spider-People in the film. With so many of the wall-crawlers already featured in the film, including Peter Parkedcar (yes, that’s real), it’s no wonder some of the superhero variants had to get cut.
For me, I was wildly entertained by Across the Spider-Verse, in spite of the incredible challenges it likely had to overcome, such as featuring a mountain of characters flooding the screen at once. The only other comparable superhero movie to do that was perhaps Avengers: Endgame — but even then, each of the heroes emerging from those portals were completely different people rather than variations on the same thing. Surely, such a feat could have only been pulled off in animation.
