Author: Chris Lee / Source: Vulture
Unlike the three Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man movies of the early- to mid-‘00s or the Amazing Spider-Man iterations featuring Andrew Garfield as the radioactive blooded superhero, Sony’s upcoming animated thriller Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse imagines a world in which a seemingly infinite number of Spideys can coexist from across the dimensions.
With dazzling new footage from the December film unveiled at San Diego Comic-Con Friday, audience members discovered that in addition to Peter Parker’s OG web slinger (voiced by New Girl co-star Jake Johnson) there is Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Ham (comedian John Mulaney), Spider-Man Noir (Nicolas Cage). And not least, the newest Spider-Man on the block, teenage Miles Morales (portrayed by Shameik Moore), who is mentored in the ways of super-power management by none other than the now 40-year-old Peter himself.But one of these things is not like the others. First appearing in Marvel Comics in 2011, the co-creation of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli, Miles arrives as moviedom’s first non-white Spider-Man — an Air Jordan-wearing Brooklynite of mixed Puerto Rican and African-American heritage struggling not only with the kind of “With great power comes great responsibility” existential overload that has burdened every masked web slinger to date, but also the daily humiliations of his family, the onset of puberty and how his hands keep getting stuck in his new classmate Gwen’s hair.
According to Into the Spider Verse’s co-directors Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman, who spoke to Vulture at a round table interview just before the Sony panel, the idea was to create a three-dimensional Miles with carefully considered cultural values rather than simply transpose a set of standard Spider-Man attributes on to a character of color in a cheap bid to make the movie “multicultural.
”“When Miles first came out, he was in the first of this wave of characters of different ethnicities taking on the identities of classic heroes,” says Ramsey. “Since then, that idea has become pretty normalized. Coming out with the Miles Morales movie now, part of the task was to say,…
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