The days to Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse get shorter and shorter, and anticipation for the animated movie is at an all-time high. Right now, the film’s greatest selling point is how it plans to go bigger than before, with Miles Morales meeting Spider-characters at a number much greater than the five travellers from the 2018 film. And in the case of some of those Spiders, he won’t just be hanging and swinging alongside them, he’ll also be visiting their neck of the woods.
Empire Magazine has a big cover story on Across the Spider-Verse this month, and in its first writeup, the outlet revealed that Miles will be jumping over to five universes during the movie’s runtime. Co-director Joaquin dos Santos called each world “robust,” and added that having Miles hop across so many worlds was like “making five films in one.” Each of those worlds will also have their own art styles, something we saw in the film’s very first trailer when Miles transitioned from his normal stylised CG look to a vibrant, but less detailed design, then back to that original look again.
As far as the five universes are concerned, Across will feature Nueva York, the home of Oscar Isaac’s Spider-Man 2099; Mumbattan, inspired by India and the residence of Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni); the punky New London where Daniel Kaluuya’s Spider-Punk hangs; and Gwen Stacy’s Earth-65, said to have a watercolor palette briefly glimpsed in Into the Spider-Verse. And that fifth and final dimension is currently under wraps, but fellow writer/producer Phil Lord hinted that it “goes hard” and will have jaw-dropping visuals.
With a tease like that, you could possibly assume that Dimension 5 is live-action. The secretive nature about it is awfully telling, and beyond that, it feels like we’re getting to a point where bringing Miles to live-action (if only for a moment) would serve as a big “holy crap, this is why we went to see it in theatres” moment on par with the veteran Spiders showing up in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Not to mention that Avengers: Secret Wars and The Kang Dynasty are both on the horizon, and Miles getting ported over to the mainline Marvel Universe was one of the big ripple effects of the comics those two films seem to be based on.
Then again, with how much the Spot is being promoted as the film’s big villain (or at the least, the big one we know about), maybe the Spiders will end up inside Spot? We’ll know for sure when Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse releases in theatres on June 2.