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The film runs at the standard 24 frames per second, but a lot of the character animation is done on twos, meaning a new drawing only every other frame, which drops the effective rate to 12. Early in the movie this is used specifically on Miles, so before he's found his footing as Spider-Man he visibly moves with less grace than the other Spider-people, who are animated more smoothly.
Instead of the usual photorealistic motion blur you'd get in modern CG, the animation team drew old-school smear frames by hand to sell fast movement, the same trick classic 2D cartoons used decades ago. It keeps every pose looking like a clean illustration rather than a blurry photograph, which is a big part of why the action reads like it's ripped straight off a comic page.
Watch anything that's slightly out of focus in the background and you'll notice it splitting into little red, green and blue fringes, mimicking chromatic aberration. It's a deliberate wink at old comic books, which often had their ink layers slightly misaligned during printing, and it's subtle enough that a lot of people watch the whole film without consciously clocking it.
This version of Wilson Fisk isn't based on any of his earlier film appearances. His look is pulled from the 1986 graphic novel Daredevil: Love and War, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz, which is also where the film gets the softer, more devoted side of Fisk's relationship with his wife Vanessa before it all curdles into obsession.
Liev Schreiber was actually the second actor locked in for the movie, right after Nicolas Cage. The filmmakers tested their early Kingpin designs against old line readings of Schreiber from Ray Donovan to see if the voice would fit, and co-director Bob Persichetti later joked that the week Schreiber finally called to accept happened to be the same week he broke his leg.
Forget the guy in a purple suit and glider from other adaptations. This Green Goblin takes his cue from the more monstrous version found in the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, ending up as a hulking, scaly, 22-foot-tall creature with a purple tongue rather than anything resembling a costume.
Kingpin's enforcer Tombstone got a deliberately eerie makeover for this film. The artists pitched him as a kind of giant zombie, meant to work as a visual counterpart to the 1930s noir stylings of Spider-Man Noir, since both characters draw from that same vintage, monochrome era of pulp fiction.
The song playing when we first meet Miles almost wasn't Sunflower at all. The filmmakers had a different track locked in for that scene until the rights fell through, leaving them scrambling to find a replacement in time to still animate the shot around it. Post Malone and Swae Lee's song ended up working even better than the original plan, since the joke was always that Miles is singing something a little out of his depth, which mirrors him being handed a role he doesn't feel ready for.
Sunflower went on to spend 33 weeks inside the Billboard Hot 100's top ten, tying the record held at the time by Maroon 5 and Cardi B's Girls Like You and Ed Sheeran's Shape of You. Not bad for a song that was only added to the movie after the original choice fell apart.
The bubbly, anime-inspired take on Peni Parker that this movie made popular is actually a pretty big departure from her original comic version, who was written as much more solemn and serious. This film's cheerier, more genki-girl interpretation ended up sticking so hard that it shaped how she's been written ever since, showing up again in the sequel and later in games like Marvel Rivals.
