“PART ONE?!” is essentially what social media exclaimed into the ether when the official Twitter page for Into the Spider-Verse (which has since changed its username and banner) dropped a surprise clip for the upcoming sequel film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. The animation opens with the same ending sequence from the 2018 Oscar-winning masterpiece, with an older looking Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld) catching up after some time apart.
For social media, it finally arrived: the first look at the upcoming sequel to the incredible story of Miles Morales and the unforgettable Spider-People who occupied the space around him back in 2018. Set for an October 2022 theatrical release, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will expand on the universe introduced in the first film in new and exciting ways.
According to Entertainment Weekly, who exclusively broke the news alongside the teaser, Across the Spider-Verse will have new directors taking over in Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson. The three look to expand on the work of original directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman.
The teaser opens with a sequence fans would remember from the end of Into the Spider-Verse but something is different. Miles and Gwen look slightly older, with Gwen asking if the room she’s entered is the same one Miles “grew up in.” With that scene, and the fact that Miles says he thought he would never see her again, we can speculate that some time has passed since they last saw each other.
What follows is some charming back and forth between the two, with Gwen discovering a drawing of herself in Miles’ notebook, and then subsequently jumping out of the window, with Miles in tow (after some coaxing, of course).
Cut to Miles winding through a multi-dimensional tunnel that seems to be warping him through the multiverse. Suddenly, he’s tackled mid-swing by none other than Spider-Man 2099, a.k.a. Miguel O’Hara, a.k.a. Oscar Isaac, and the two engage in an action-packed sequence with little insight into how they got there. O’Hara made an appearance in the post-credit scene of Into the Spider-Verse and fans have since wondered when Isaac’s Spider-Man would reappear, and reappear he did.
The teaser sent social media into an utter free fall, and rightly so, as Into the Spider-Verse completely rewrote and reinvented the Spider-Man story on a visual and narrative level. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is set to drop exclusively in theaters October 2022, but the date cannot arrive soon enough.
looks stellar and it does look like Miles aged a bit