Ever since Marvel leapt on to the scene 10 years ago with the vibrant and entertaining Iron Man, rivals have been doing their best to ape the studio’s barnstorming box office success. From Warner Bros’s struggling DC Extended Universe – set to dip another toe in the comic book ocean with the upcoming Aquaman – to Universal Pictures’ doomed Dark Universe concept, Hollywood execs with dollar signs in their eyes have tried desperately to beat Marvel at its own game with varying degrees of success.
The irony is that since 2018, the only truly successful superhero movies outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), with the notable exception of DC’s Wonder Woman, have been those that chose to smash the zeitgeist and strike out on their own. The Lego Batman Movie thrived by immersing itself in an Olympic-length swimming pool of geeky pop culture references; Logan reimagined the comic book flick as one-shot noir. Now comes Sony’s clumsily titled but refreshingly eccentric Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, out this week in the UK and due to hit US screens at the weekend. It’s a movie that does to the established big screen superhero formula what Hulk did to Loki in the first Avengers movie, leaving suggestions that the Marvel way is the only road to success in a bedraggled, defeated heap.
The key to the new film’s triumph is in its animated nature. As well as delving heavily into outlandish psychedelic visuals, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse shamelessly half-inches far-out sci-fi concepts (namely the idea of parallel universes) that have been keeping comic book writers in the creative gravy since the 1960s. Both Marvel and DC have regularly explained away alternative takes on their key heroes by suggesting that each of them exists in different versions of Earth. Perhaps the most famous example is DC’s division of its roster into Earth-Two (Golden Age) and Earth-One (Silver Age) universes, an anomaly that was wrenched out of existence with the seminal 1985 series Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse knows it has a problem with audience engagement from the beginning. We have seen the Spider-Man story played out on the big screen so many times, most recently only last year with Spider-Man: Homecoming, that the appetite for another wall crawler movie is somewhat diminished. Throw in the fact that this is not even the big screen Spidey that most fans know and love (Peter Parker), and the movie was always going to be a tough ask.
Except when it’s not. Because this is a film that, slowly and surely and with consummate verve and spirit, unravels all our objections to its existence. Using the multiple reality concept as a plot device, we are introduced to a world in which the new Spider-Man, Miles Morales, can easily co-exist with at least a half dozen other versions. Even fans who were a little tearful at the idea of bidding farewell to Parker will find their appetites sated.
The brilliance of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Sony’s decision to green light such an original concept, is that no live-action movie could do what it does. It delves into the extremes of comic book nuttiness that have usually been reserved for print, where writers’ wilder instincts are allowed free rein due to the absence of budget constraints and rigidly uncreative producorial oversight that can plague expensive Hollywood productions.
To reference two obvious examples: when 20th Century Fox loosely adapted the Mark Millar graphic novel Old Man Logan for Wolverine flick Logan last year, the studio excised all the print version’s most ridiculous flights of fancy, notably an entire family of redneck Hulks who have taken over a portion of the US and are ruling it as their personal fiefdom. The same happened when Marvel borrowed aspects of Planet Hulk for the MCU movie Thor: Ragnarok. Both movies worked superbly as live-action experiences, but something of the original comic book razzmatazz was lost.
The MCU’s most notable concession to the unfettered boys own silliness of the comics is perhaps Thanos’s mind-blowing finger click at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. But it has taken Marvel hours of run-time to build up such a repository of audience trust that it can unleash the crazy in this manner.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, purely due to the power of the best animation to invent a stylised world that audiences can instantly believe in, manages to get there in its first 20 minutes. One of Spidey’s key nemeses is thrillingly reimagined as a different gender, a genuinely outrageous moment for superfans. Another, the Kingpin, is drawn as a giant, square-shouldered tank of a man, imbuing him with a sense of stylised power and menace that knocks even the famous portrayal by the enormous Michael Clarke Duncan in 2003’s Daredevil to the canvass. One of the alternate Spideys encountered by Morales is a diminutive Looney Tunes-style talking Spider-pig.
The only question now is whether the new film will do well enough at the US box office this weekend for anyone to sit up and notice its remarkable achievement. Deadline suggests the film may open to around $30m, less than half the amount taken in its first weekend by the critically-reviled Venom, also from Sony and also set in Spider-Man’s world. We can only hope that word of mouth leads to this one becoming a sleeper hit that genuine fans on both sides of the Atlantic find their way to seeing over the next few weeks. For there is little doubt that Sony has stumbled on a new way forward for comic book movies.
Maybe, just maybe, the solution to matching the MCU’s unprecedented triumphs over the past decade isn’t simply for rivals to blindly ape everything the studio does, to scramble like mad to out-Marvel Marvel itself. Maybe Sony has found its very own alternate universe.
