Teen Miles Morales becomes the Spider-Man of his universe and must join with five spider-powered individuals from other dimensions to stop a threat for all realities.
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When this film took home the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, it beat out Incredibles 2, Isle of Dogs, Mirai and Ralph Breaks the Internet, and it did it as a film with no Pixar or Disney involvement, something that had really only happened before with DreamWorks' Shrek and Rango.
Co-director Peter Ramsey became the first African-American director to win an Academy Award in the Best Animated Feature category, sharing the win with fellow directors Bob Persichetti and Rodney Rothman alongside producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
Made on a $90 million budget, the film wasn't a guaranteed hit going in, since it was the first fully animated Spider-Man movie and had to win over both newcomers and comic-book purists at the same time. It ended up grossing nearly $375 million worldwide and opened to $35.4 million domestically, which set a record for the biggest opening weekend ever for an animated film released in December.
Miles Morales here became the first Afro-Latino incarnation of Spider-Man to headline mainstream media, carrying a Puerto Rican mother and African American father into a character who'd previously only existed on the big screen as Peter Parker.
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.
After the museum fight, listen closely and you'll catch a snippet of Post Malone's voice being replayed, the same audio clip that featured on the soundtrack of the first film. It's a subtle audio callback rather than a visual one, easy to miss if you're not paying attention to the sound design.
Producers have pointed out that the first film featured around 40 characters, while this sequel ballooned to roughly 240. Combined with the jump from one dimension to six, it's a good snapshot of just how much bigger a scope the filmmakers were chasing the second time around.
Brian Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez and Greta Lee all came back from the first film to reprise their roles as Miles' parents and his aunt, giving the family side of the story a real sense of continuity even as the multiverse stuff around them gets bigger and stranger.
