The internet is freaking out after finally noticing there are multiple versions of Across the Spider-Verse showing in theatres. Moviegoers have been posting TikToks of the film, revealing alternative takes with different animation and jokes spread across the multiꦛverse. The changes are quite small, and it’s interesting to see how long it took before people started to realise they weren’t all seeing the same thing.
It takes a sharp eye to catch them, but Spider-Verse associate editor Andy Leviton later , saying, “I was wondering when people might start noticing”. It’s a wonderful touch on a great film about multiverses, with audiences seeing different versions based on their choice of where to watch the film – our choices, too, have an imꩵpact on what happens in the movie, at least in how we perceive it.
On the same day as this confirmation, published an article where four artists spoke about what it was like making Across The Spider-Verse. In it, they described the process as “death by a thousand paper cuts”, detailing how writers and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were overly involved, making frequent changes to already-completed sequences that created massive amounts of backlog for multiple departments, leading to employees enduring over a year of gruelling crunch. Things kept getting redone over and over, making the process “debilitating” foꦕr many of the artists, according to one source they interviewed. A lot of this was caused, allegedly, by the writing coꦏntinually changing, with Lord having “no idea what he wanted”.
As many as 100 of the film crew, out of over 1,000 artists and techs, left the project. To employees who felt as if the filmmaking process was unnecessarily convoluted and that they shouldn’t have had to revise finalised renders so many times, Amy Pascal, producer of the three ܫmost recent live-action Spider-Man mov💎ies and both Into and Across the Spider-Verse, said, “I guess, welcome to making a movie.”
Here lies the central issue: Across the Spider-Verse is a marvel. It’s revolutionary in its creativity, especially in a superhero genre that’s plagued with predictable live-action movies. It has an incredibly distinct visual style, great writing, and tells an amazing story. But this is no way to make a film when you employ this many people. Lord and Miller used an iterative process – as Pascal said to Vulture, “One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right.” But also, as one of the artists said, “Because it’s successful, because it’s award-winning, [Lord] doesn’t have a lot of people stopping him from making the changes he wants to make🍸.”
Cinema has always had auteurs, some of whom have had less than ethical practices in getting the results they wanted. It’s not much of a stretch to say that Across the Spider-Verse and its predecessor are the works of auteurs, because of how absolutely singular they are in today’s media landscape. But we need to care about the ethics of cinema because real people are making these films – people for whom years of work are getting lost in endless revisions and polishing, people who are burning out because writers aren&﷽rsquo;t locking thꦆeir scripts. Iteration is necessary for making a good film, but this should be done in the writing stage.
It’s not fair to everybody working on a film for there to be constant changes, forcing this many people to be working on something that is constantly in flux. Now imagine that you’re doing this, but there are multiple versions. That’s more work for artists that they know is likely to change, that is a nice touch but far less crucial than actually finishing the movie. We could take💖 the optimistic view that some of the extra work artists had to do was included in these alternative takes, but we really don’t know.
One of the artists said that Beyond the Spider-Verse will likely not be released in March. “There’s no way that movie’s coming out then. There’s been progress on the pre-production side of things. But as far as the production side goes, the only progress that’s been made on the third one is any exploration or tests that were done before the movie was split into two parts,” the artist said. If Lord and Miller don’t get their writing locked before🍌 starting work on the animation, we’re bound to see the same thing happen to Beyond the Spider-Verse, with artists’ rights thrown to the wayside in the pursuit of making an unfinished movie to hit an arbitrary date. I have to ask: is it worth it? Is the creation of art worth the sacrifice of so many, because of a lack of concrete vision? I’m inclined to believe workers’ rights are more important. I don’t want to see this kind of animation stop existing, but I’d sure like for it to be better managed. That’s what we owe the artists who make it all possible in the first place.