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Stan Lee's cameo in this one isn't just his little shop scene. The 180-odd animators on the film were all diehard Marvel fans and every single one of them wanted a shot at drawing him, so the directors let them sneak him in wherever they could. Pause the movie any time a subway train rattles past in the background and there's a very good chance you'll spot him sat inside it. It ended up being his last ever voice role.
Lily Tomlin voicing Aunt May keeps a weirdly specific streak going. Rosemary Harris, Sally Field and Marisa Tomei all played May in live action and all picked up Oscar nominations at some point in their careers, and Tomlin herself was nominated for Nashville decades earlier. The writers apparently had her in mind the whole time they were writing this tougher, more no-nonsense version of the character.
The shot everyone remembers, Miles stepping off the building and finally trusting himself as he swings off into the city, was there from the very first draft of the script. It never got rewritten out or reworked into something else, it just stayed the emotional center of the whole movie and became the backbone of the marketing too.
Miles' invisibility power sounds simple on paper, but figuring out how it should actually look on screen was a nightmare for the animation team. They went through around 70 different visual designs trying to nail down something that felt cool without looking like a generic vanishing effect, before landing on the version that made it into the final cut.
Nicolas Cage grew up reading comics, so getting a call about Spider-Man Noir was a dream gig for him, especially once the filmmakers told him to just have fun with it. Since Noir is a hard-boiled 1930s detective rendered in black and white, Cage leaned on Humphrey Bogart for the clipped, fast-talking delivery, figuring it would land with both noir fans and kids discovering the genre for the first time.
The comic-book look wasn't just a filter slapped over the CG. Every rendered frame got a hand-drawn pass from an artist afterward, and the directors wouldn't allow any panels, sound-effect lettering or word balloons on screen until after Miles gets bitten. On a normal animated film a team can knock out four seconds of footage in a week. Here it took roughly a month.
That running gag about Peter Parker releasing a cheesy holiday album, complete with titles like a mistletoe-themed swing anthem, wasn't planned from the start. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller dreamed it up while the film was already being scored, and only found out Chris Pine could actually sing when he showed up and nailed the recording session.
This was John Mulaney's first role in a theatrically released movie, and the producers told him to just play around in the booth. He took that a little too literally at first, ad-libbing a string of curse words as Spider-Ham before finally stopping to ask what rating they were going for. Once he found out it was a family film, he dialed it right back.
Peter B. Parker going through a messy split from Mary Jane is actually a nod to an unmade Sam Raimi script. Raimi had once planned for Peter and MJ to be married and later divorced in a fourth live-action film, after Peter's affair with Felicia Hardy came to light. Raimi eventually backed away from that storyline because it made Peter too unlikeable, and the project got shelved when Sony wouldn't give him time for a rewrite. This film quietly resurrects the idea as a joke.
Co-director Rodney Rothman has said a huge chunk of how Miles moves and feels came directly from Shameik Moore's voice work. Moore landed the role after one set of dialogue tests, and he wasn't just reading lines, he was bringing unscripted emotion and body language that the animators then built the character's physical performance around.
