“Go woke, go broke!” encapsulates the schadenfreude that rightwing culture warriors express when art forms that embrace progressive ideals fail commercially. Such sentiment has been vanquished by the success of Spider-Man: Across the Spider‑Verse, which is currently the biggest film in the US, grossing more than half a billion dollars worldwide in a month. The animated movie, a sequel to 2018’s Oscar‑winning Into the Spider‑Verse, bounces around different universes meeting socially aware, racially diverse superheroes. The main character is African‑Latino Spider-Man, Miles Morales; Gwen Stacy’s Spidey endorses trans rights; there’s an Indian Spider‑Man with an anti‑colonial outlook living in a Mumbai‑Manhattan hybrid; and a pregnant biker Spider‑Woman. One of the film’s themes, spread over two hours of dazzling artwork, is how identity is a constant negotiation of race, class, nationality and gender.
The movie is also rewriting the script in Hollywood. First, it entrenches animation as a coming cinematic form – expanding beyond studios such as the child-friendly Pixar and the ethereal output of Studio Ghibli. Guillermo del Toro’s remake of Pinocchio as a dark animated musical won this year’s Oscar. The Mexican director was so taken with the technique that he declared in June: “I only want to do animation.” Across the Spider-Verse is also a testament to the democratisation of film-making; among the 1,000 people who contributed was a 14-year-old whose animated Lego characters made it into the final cut.
The multiverse is a cinematic plot device that came into its own with Into the Spider-Verse. It also took centre stage in last year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and in the latest superhero blockbuster, The Flash. It’s not all about caped crusaders: the Oscar-winning live action film Everything Everywhere All at Once uses the same trick. The attraction of the multiverse is that it can combine characters and cultural references from different times and places without requiring much explanation.
Spider-Man’s success in breaking the mould is partly because the character can exist outside the Marvel comic empire, which sold the webslinger’s film rights to Sony in the late 1990s. (Tom Holland’s live action Spidey is only allowed to appear in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe thanks to a deal between the two studios.) That means Sony has more freedom to tell its own Spider-Man stories, rather than sticking to the comic-book script. But with great power, as every Spider-Man fan knows, comes great responsibility. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to arrive in April 2022, before it was postponed to October and debuted in June. Reports suggest the relentless perfectionism of its creators didn’t help, with many crew members physically exhausted and scores quitting in frustration.
The powerful appeal of the original Spider-Man story is that he is a hero who never grows up. No Way Home – the live-action movie featuring three Spideys – was the highest grossing film of 2021. What makes Morales’s teenage character interesting is that he is left at the end of the latest film pondering a very adult dilemma: how to reconcile a responsibility to society with his own humanity. It’s a cliffhanger, but the story will soon resume in the last Spider-Verse movie. It is only there that this surprisingly complex trilogy will reveal in what way youthful idealism can bridge the differences between us – and the differences within ourselves.
