Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was a hit when it opened in theaters last summer and while The Boy and the Heron could steal its "Best Animated Feature" Oscar, the sequel remains a groundbreaking masterpiece.
Directors Justin K. Thompson, Kemp Powers, and Joaquim Dos Santos recently spoke to Collider (via Toonado.com) about their work on the Marvel Comics adaptation and revealed plans for the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequel to end with a completely different Prowler!
"Initially in Earth 42 at the end, that Miles wasn't the Prowler, remember?" Powers tells the site. "We had even designed the character quite differently, and it was fairly late in the game and we were kind of doing an audience review and we started texting one another during the review, and I felt so guilty because it was like, 'Oh my god, the character designers are gonna have to redo this character because wouldn't it be great if he was the Prowler in this universe?' [Laughs]"
Unfortunately, he doesn't reveal who the Prowler would have been, but we'd guess it was either Uncle Aaron again or, in what would have been a major twist, perhaps even Miles' dad, Jefferson Davis.
We've heard animators working on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse were constantly under pressure thanks to last-minute changes, but it's clear these were done in the hope of making the movie as great as possible. Powers would later note, "A lot of things like that, like the Donald Glover moment, Prowler Miles, all these things that were not in the film for years."
That wasn't the only big change to the ending, though, as the shot with Spider-Gwen leading a group of wall-crawling heroes to save Miles Morales was only inserted into the story a mere six weeks before we sat down to watch it in theaters!
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"We actually had a screening and it just ended with Miles on the bag, and everybody was just like, 'Boo!'" Thompson remembers. "And we went, 'Oh god, what are we gonna do? We gotta do something.' We ran back and we quickly scrambled and brainstormed and realized. We went back and watched The Empire Strikes Back again, and said, 'How did Empire Strikes Back do it?' And we realized, 'Oh, they gave you hope at the end.'"
"So we boarded it, animated it, put it all together within six weeks, and then screened it again. The audience went through the roof, and we went, 'Okay!'"
Dos Santos then weighed in to explain how little touches also made a big difference to how the audience would feel after being left with a massive cliffhanger.
"So, it's like the difference of Miles being in this really bad position, and it looks grim for him, versus a little character modulation, like him starting to touch the chain and the sparks coming through his hands, and that glint in his eye."
"It's really, really subtle, but you can see the Prowler's Gauntlet there, and it starts dimming a little bit because he's drawing power from the gauntlet. So those little things, it's almost subconscious, but it really does help you feel like Miles has some agency in the scene."
Unfortunately, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse remains undated so we have no real idea when that movie will swing into theaters and end this story. Once it is released, the expectation is that Miles will then enter the live-action realm, hopefully in the MCU.