Teenager Miles Morales struggles to adjust to life in a new school while discovering his own unique Spider-Man abilities. When a mysterious collider opens portals to alternate dimensions, he encounters multiple versions of Spider-Man from other universes, each with their own style and experience. Together, they must work to stop a threat that could destroy all their realities. The film explores themes of identity, responsibility, and courage, blending action, humor, and innovative animation to tell a story about finding one's place in a vast multiverse.
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Spider-Man 2099's home turf, Nueva York, was styled after Syd Mead's illustrations, the same kind of sleek, glassy futurism Mead brought to films like Blade Runner. It gives Miguel's world a cold, almost sterile beauty that fits his buttoned-up, rules-first personality.
Earth-65, Gwen Stacy's dimension, uses a watercolour-wash technique meant to mirror the covers of her own comic run, and the colours in her world visibly shift depending on her mood, which is a detail a lot of people don't clock until a rewatch.
Somewhere in the Spider-Society crowd is a Lego minifigure version of Spider-Man, and Miguel actually pauses to tell him he's one of the best, brick pun very much intended. It's a throwaway gag, but the animators clearly had fun giving the Lego universe its own little moment in the spotlight.
The Spider-Society scenes are absolutely rammed with alternate Spider-heroes, somewhere around 280 of them by most counts, though only about a third actually get a name and a line of dialogue. The rest are just background gags for eagle-eyed fans to freeze-frame and argue about online.
When the Renaissance-Vulture loses a wing mid-fight, she simply pulls a fresh one out of thin air, and Spider-Man 2099 dryly calls it hammerspace. That's a cartoon-logic term, and it's also a cheeky reference to Spider-Ham's whole running gag from the first film of yanking props out of nowhere.
The Vulture that ambushes Gwen isn't Michael Keaton's version, it's an alternate Adrian Toomes from a dimension stuck in Renaissance-era Italy, complete with Da Vinci-inspired flying contraptions instead of tech-suit wings. It's a fun way to show how differently the same villain can turn out depending on the world he grew up in.
J.K. Simmons comes back as J. Jonah Jameson, and true to the multiverse setup, we hear versions of him pop up across several different realities. It's a nice bit of continuity fan-service, treating him as the one constant no matter which universe Miles happens to swing through.
Keep an eye out during the Spider-Society crowd scenes and you'll spot the lead from the Spectacular Spider-Man animated series delivering a line of encouragement to Miles, along with a version of the 1967 cartoon Spider-Man who swings in, takes a swing, and immediately complains about pulling a muscle.
At around two hours and twenty minutes, this is genuinely one of the lengthiest animated films to come out of a major Western studio. Producer Amy Pascal has said the goal was never to just make things bigger for the sake of it, the extra runtime was there to actually earn the audience's investment in the characters.
For a film with six different animation styles running simultaneously, the reported production budget of around $100 million is surprisingly restrained compared to what major studios usually spend on animated blockbusters. It ended up pulling in close to $691 million worldwide, making it one of the most profitable films of its year.
