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Sony’s visually incredible Spider-Verse movies are amazing at creating a sensation of tension—most especially, if you’re like us, that one that set in at about the two-hour mark of second film Across The Spider-Verse, when you realized there was no fucking way the movie was going to wrap up all its ever-escalating plot threads before the credits had to roll. The resulting cliffhanger was already slated to last a long time—four years!—and is now set to get just a little bit longer, as Sony announced this weekend that it’s bumping the film back another three weeks on its release calendar, to June 25, 2027.
This is all, of course, the fault of those damnable children: Studio execs apparently figured they’d do better at the box office if they aimed their brightly colored Spider-adventure for a week when more kids were already out on summer vacation. (Early June didn’t seem to hurt Across, which pretty much doubled the first movie’s box office take when it landed on June 2, 2023, but given how expensive these movies are to make, we guess we can’t fault Sony for wanting to squeeze every Peni out of them.)
The real question, of course, is whether there will be any animators left alive by the time we get to 2027: Across The Spider-Verse reportedly churned through a ton of artists on its way to that 2023 release, with one big Vulture piece quoting people calling conditions on the film “not sustainable.” (Including reports that directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller kept requesting fully rendered, final-film quality sequences that they’d then ask for edits to, a labor-intensive practice that apparently contributed to burnout as much as it did to the film’s jaw-dropping visuals.)
Across The Spider-Verse will once again star Shameik Moore and Hailee Steinfeld as its animated versions of Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy, and the small percentage of us who actually expect to still be alive when it eventually arrives in theaters are keeping our fingers crossed it’ll wrap the series up in fitting fashion.
[via THR]
