← back
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse poster

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

2023 · Kemp Powers

For a big-screen spectacle night when you want to be genuinely wowed — great with a crowd, great with the volume up, and rich enough to rewatch frame by frame.

What it's about

Miles Morales, Brooklyn's teenage Spider-Man, is pulled out of his own world and into a sprawling multiverse policed by the Spider Society — an entire organization of Spider-People. When they clash over how to handle a new threat, Miles finds himself at odds with every other Spider there is, forced to fight for the right to write his own story.

The experience

Overwhelming in the best way — every parallel world has its own art style, and the film moves at a sprint — yet the emotional core, a kid pushing back against everyone telling him who he's allowed to be, lands hard and clean. It's dazzling and sincere at once.

Performances

Shameik Moore gives Miles real stubborn heart, and Hailee Steinfeld makes Gwen Stacy's storyline — rendered in watercolors that shift with her moods — the film's secret emotional anchor.

The craft

Hundreds of artists sustain a half-dozen incompatible visual idioms, often inside a single frame: Gwen's world bleeds like wet watercolor, Mumbattan crackles like hand-inked comic pages, one villain looks scribbled in ballpoint. It's one of the most visually ambitious studio films ever made and demands the biggest screen and best sound you can find.

Why it matters

It proved the first film's revolution was a floor, not a ceiling, pushing mainstream animation even further from one-house-style uniformity and raising the bar for what a blockbuster sequel can attempt.

Reception & legacy: how Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was received, argued over, and remembered →

The rare sequel that treats its predecessor's revolution as a floor, not a ceiling. Miles Morales is pulled out of Brooklyn and into a sprawl of parallel worlds, each rendered in its own idiom — Gwen Stacy's universe washes itself in watercolor that bleeds with her moods, Mumbattan crackles like hand-inked comics pages, and one antagonist looks torn from a ballpoint sketchbook, unfinished lines quivering. Directors Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson, and Joaquim Dos Santos coordinate hundreds of artists across what amounts to a half-dozen incompatible aesthetics inside single frames, and the miracle is that the emotional throughline — a teenager insisting on authoring his own story against an institution that calls his life a fixed narrative — never gets lost in the spectacle. It is also, unapologetically, half a film, ending mid-breath in the tradition of The Empire Strikes Back. The canon-versus-anomaly conflict doubles as the movie's own artistic manifesto: the belief that a story can break its prescribed pattern and survive.

Lines of influence