The Big Picture - ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’: One of the Best Superhero Movies Ever | Exit Survey (Ep. 108)

Episode Date: December 14, 2018

Sean Fennessey and Micah Peters recap the surprising highs of the latest installment of the ‘Spider-Man’ universe — an animated film that's also a major achievement in the genre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, it's Liz Kelley. Here's what's going on at The Ringer for the rest of the week. We're covering award season nominations, TV superlatives for the year, and the best memes of 2018. You can check those out on TheRinger.com. And check out The Ringer's Instagram, where every Friday the staff provides their weekend recommendations, and every Saturday, our very own Kate Halliwell takes over with her new show, Tea Time, where she offers up her thoughts on the latest celebrity gossip. Make sure to follow us on Instagram at Ringer. In your universe, there's only one Spider-Man.

But there is another universe. It looks and sounds like yours, but it's not. My name is Miles Morales. I'm Sean Fennessey, editor-in-chief of The Ringer, and this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the multiverse. And I'm joined by Ringer staff writer Micah Peters. Micah, what's up? What's going down?

Micah, we're here to talk about Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse, which is a movie. And it's a movie that I will say, when I was first made aware of it, I was like, well, this is a bad idea. This doesn't make any sense at all. Oh, another Spider-Man movie? Another Spider-Man movie. I think this is the seventh Spider-Man movie. I think that that might actually be on the low side of the estimate. I was thinking it was more like a hundred.

It's a hundred. Okay. So this is the 101st Spider-Man movie. And it's delightful that you and I can both report that this movie is great. It's absolutely fantastic. It's shocking. It really improved. I was floating afterward. We were both floating.

We were emotional. We laughed. The music is banging. The vocal performances are incredible. The animation, this we should say, is an animated movie, is, I think, sort of extraordinary. It's unlike any other animated movie I've ever seen. Well, yeah, I mean, we were talking about how it's very,

it's as close to being a Pixar movie as you can get without being a Pixar movie, but it also has, like, the very hard lines of, like, a comic book and the way that the colors are saturated are just so, and it looks amazing. Yeah, I think that's one of the, I think that's one of the things that the critics early on have been saying about it, which is this more than any comic book movie that we've had. And of course, comic book movies are the lingua franca of modern popular culture these days. This really approximates that feeling of having the pages between your fingers. And that's not easy to do because you think of reading a comic and it's a static

experience. It's emotional, but you're flipping and you're holding and it's physical. Sitting in a movie theater is different. Your senses need to overwhelm you. And this movie does an amazing job of that. We're going to talk a little bit about what we liked about the movie, the choices that the filmmakers made to make this such an effective construction. Going into the Spider-Verse is a confusing concept. And I'll be very curious to see how nine-year-olds handle some of the depth of this movie. I mean, as a person who once explained basically time zones to my nephew by being like, when we go to Atlanta, we're going to lose an hour. And he was just like, is it going to hurt? And I was like, well, yeah.

And then when we come back, you're going to have to defeat your former self in single combat. Then only one of you gets to live. My sister hit me over the head with a purse. I mean, you more or less described what happens in this movie, which is that we live in a universe in which there is a Peter Parker and there is a young man named Miles Morales. And Miles Morales is bitten by some sort of radioactive spider though not unlike the not like the one we've seen in the past right right so Miles Morales like in canon or whatever has like the ability to turn invisible and you know like shoot out electric currents and you know like emit electric currents from his body or whatever like stuff that Peter Parker

doesn't have in the comic books when uh the character is created by Brian Michael Bendis and Sarah Pacelli in the ultimate Spider-Man, basically he steps into the Spider-Man mantle after Peter Parker dies with a fight with the Green Goblin in the comic books. And that's sort of kind of what happens here in this movie. There's a setup where there's the Peter Parker in this universe

and Miles in this universe. There's a super Hadron Collider of some kind that opens portals to other universes. It's kind of like a... None of... It doesn't make

strict scientific sense, but it doesn't have to. You get the gist. Yes. And in the movie, Kingpin is one of... is the biggest heavy in the movie.

And Kingpin is, I guess, the proprietor of this Hadron Collider. Yes. Well, actually, it's like Doc Ock is actually Olivia Octavius or whatever. And it's her Hadron Collider. She built it. He funded it.

And he's just like, it's mine. And there's the tension amongst the ranks and the evil ranks. That is how it kind of crops up. So anyway, they use this Hadron Collider and then they open up a wormhole into multiple universes. And from those universes emerges several spider creatures. And, you know, the movie is largely oriented around Miles's journey to becoming a Spider-Man and what he needs to do and his relationship to his father, his relationship to his Uncle Aaron, his relationship to this new girl who he has met in school named, we first learned Gwanda, but ultimately learned is an alternate universe, Gwen Stacy. This is, it's so funny because trying to talk about it, I feel like this is really confusing, but somehow in the movie, I was just kind of rolling with it. I kind of got it. It wasn't, and I think that there's

like an extraordinary accomplishment in that. Well, yeah. I mean, like it's kind of, say for instance, Lily Tomlin's character where she voices Aunt May and Aunt May is, you know, just kind of, you think that she's just, oh, you know, like I'm so, like, you need to give Aunt May a hug. You need to figure out whether or not she needs, has she eaten yet or whatever. She's an elderly old woman. Yeah. But it turns out that, you know, she's the Madam Web character, which is just like, well, in the comics, the Madam Web character is kind of like at the center of the spider verse or or whatever and she's like a precognitive mutant and you know like knows everything kind of ways whether or not she just kind of exists outside of time okay like kind of a professor x-esque figure and the way that they

explain that in like the cartoons when i was coming up i was just kind of like okay well eventually you know peter's gonna have some sort of crisis of character. And then like, he's going to end up outside of the continuum of space-time talking to this old lady. And then after that, she's going to be like, well, you'll do it when it's worth it to you or something like that. And it's, it's kind of like the same deal. You just kind of roll with it. Yeah. And I think that that's one of the interesting things about this movie. It is both allegiant to the Spider-Man that we came to know as comic book readers, but also as watchers of the Tobey Maguire movies, maybe even the Andrew Garfield movies, certainly the Spider-Man Homecoming. This movie has nothing to do really with any of those movies, and that's by design. And what it also does is it shows us some of the hallmarks of the story, which is that

it flashes on Spider-Man's origin. It flashes on with great power comes great responsibility with Uncle Ben's death. It shows us these things. And then as it starts to introduce these new spider characters, it uses that trope really effectively to kind of subvert it. And it's funny, you know, you said to me right before we sat down to watch the movie, God, I really hope they don't like belabor the freaking origin story. I feel like every superhero movie I walk into, they're like, oh, 40 minutes of the origin story. And of course they do this right at the top of this movie,

but in a way that is new and inventive. Yeah, like, and it's, they kind of turn it inside out and then use it, like you said, extremely effectively throughout the entire movie. It's, and another thing that you said as we were leaving was just like, you know, we're over two decades or like into this and, you know, it's worth it

to step back and examine the process and this is a movie that does that. And on top of that, it's extremely funny the way that they do it. It's very, the script is really, really well written. I mean, we should say that this movie comes from the production team of Lord and Miller, who most recently came under some fire for being fired off of the solo film in the Star Wars universe.

These are the guys who made 21 and 22 Jump Street. They made the Lego movie. They're really at home in a world like this, which is kind of rife with meta commentary, but also incredibly sweet and sincere and empathic towards his characters. It's a really hard thing to pull off. They've done such an amazing job of this. You know, I did also mention to you that the movie that I saw the night before this movie

was Aquaman, which I'll talk more about on this podcast next week when Aquaman gets closer to release. Aquaman is a complicated movie. I wouldn't say a bad movie, but it doesn't have any of the self-awareness or the you know it's not it's self-awareness but not self-consciousness of Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse there's something very knowing about the humor and about the

character design of these of this world that makes it wholly unique to me so I it's I don't want to overpraise this movie because it's we're sort of it yeah coming off of aquaman i'm kind of like well yeah the bar is lowering but but it is i i mean like like you said the great power comes great responsibility line like the way that that comes up in the movie is that you know like one of the characters is saying it to the other he's like don't you dare like it's it's so many of the things are like there's callbacks to everything that you've seen on screen or you know like everything is kind of you know in the spirit of what you read on the page but okay so think about like the way that the spider man character was created i mean like it was steve uh ditko and stan lee basically making a character

that appealed to younger readers. This is a guy that is not established as a superhero yet, isn't accepted by the Avengers or any of the older superheroes like the Fantastic Four. He's figuring it out on his own and also going through puberty. So it's like he could be you, he could be anyone, but he was white. You know what I mean? He was white. And like, so that kind of puts a cap on the, like, it could be anyone underneath the mask. And then that's like a cool thing that happens during the movie is that Miles is just like,

you know, like it could be anyone, like that's one of the, the voiceover, you know, like as the movie's ending, it's just like, it could be anybody. And then it's like actually true because, uh, Miles is biracial. He's Afro Puerto Rican from Brooklyn. And like, there's a really cool scene in the first part, like the,

the opening of the movie where he's walking down the street, like in Brooklyn, dapping up people, dapping up people, and then speaking to people in Spanish. And then, you know, like putting on his, you know, phone interview voice. And then there's like codes.

It's like, it's great. I loved every second of it. Yeah. And that stuff doesn't feel overworked and it doesn't feel messagey. It's just sort of like there are also people like this, you know, and that's one of the genius aspects of the movie that the meta aspects of it show us all of these different people wearing the Spider-Man costume. And it reveals that, but also just by spending a lot of time with miles in miles's head you know the movie opens i think in this really kind of charming moment where he's in his room he's got his headphones on and he's awkwardly singing that swaley and post malone song yes

sunflower from the soundtrack yeah which i you know i will say when i heard sunflower on spotify a couple weeks ago i was was like, this is trash. And then I saw it in this movie, in this scene, and him kind of miming the syllables of the song without knowing the words, which is something we've all done a million times. And you immediately recognize Miles as a real person, even though he's an animated kid in a comic book movie. Yeah, it's fantastic. And also, I mean, as soon as that scene came in and then it opens up and then you hear the entire song as he's doing this walkthrough, I mean, you just heard what he's doing. I was just like, damn it, this song is good.

Well, Sway Lee is good and Post Malone is less good, but it's mostly a Sway Lee song in my mind. The music in this movie in general is pretty great. This is certainly the first superhero movie to feature Biggie's hypnotized. So I was delighted to hear that as an aging man. I also like that they didn't kind of fudge around or do the thing where let's skirt around the more, you know, edgier lyrics in the song and let's use this one clip instead of whatever. And he's just like, nah, if they have right, Vicky, the air night and it's on, it's in there. That's in the movie. Yeah. It's an,

it's an amazing thing. I mean, so let's talk a little bit more about the actual characters in the movie. We've obviously talked about miles. We've talked about one Peter Parker. Sure. You know, this is a spoiler podcast. It's an exit survey. So we're just going to be spoiling throughout. This first Peter Parker that we meet is not really the Peter Parker that we know. The one that we meet is blonde haired, blue eyed. He's voiced by Chris Pine. And he is unfailingly kind and unflappable. And like, yeah, he sort of defies that Ditko Lee version of Spider-Man that you're talking about, who was kind of a confused and complicated teenager

trying to figure out the world. And this Peter Parker that we meet is kind of perfect. And the ironic aspect of him being perfect is, of course, he dies fairly early on in the movie at the hands of Kingpin. Then all of a sudden, these new Spider-Men and Spider-People and Spider-Creat creatures start cropping up. The first of which is Peter Parker. Just a different Peter.

Peter B. Parker. Peter B. Parker. And Peter B. Parker is voiced, I think, incredibly well by Jake Johnson, who people know from New Girl. It's so good. It's an awesome performance from Jake Johnson, who was sort of born to do something like this. And his Peter Parker is, I'm going to be a little self-referential here. I saw a lot of myself in his Peter Parker. Not just in the fact that he's like a sort of tall, but with a little bit of a punch and he's graying at the temples and he's

unshaven. And there were some physical aspects of his presentation that I identified with. I just want everybody to know that Sean's shirt is tucked in right now. My shirt is tucked in. I'm just, I'm an adult man of 36. And so I related to this Peter Parker, you know, and this character at this time has been divorced from Mary Jane. He is, feels like he has failed Aunt May. He is an imperfect Spider-Man in a lot of ways. All of the ways that the blonde, blue-eyed, crisp-eyed Peter Parker is perfect, Jake Johnson's Peter Parker, Peter B. Parker, is lacking. And so he's an unlikely mentor to Miles. Nevertheless, they're brought together. He has to mentor him. What did you think about the way that they kind of fuse these two characters? I mean, I love the fact that he's just... It's something you've seen, the story you've seen a lot, which is the very grizzled and over it in the midst of a 20-year existential crisis person befriending the young guy or whatever.

Hard to believe I relate to this guy. But I mean, I loved everything about their interactions just because basically as it goes on, you notice things. Because, all right, so functionally, the Peter Parker that you meet first, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed one, has been Spider-Man for 10 years. And Peter B. Parker, Jake Johnson's Peter Parker,

has been Spider-Man for 20 years. And it's just kind of like, all right, a lot can happen in those 10 years afterwards. You know, like after you've, you know, become an action figure and you've been on talk shows and you have a Christmas album

and people love you. And it's just kind of like, all right, well, maybe I save the world too much. Maybe I work too much. And, you know, that's why everything imploded or whatever, whatever, whatever. And these are like real questions that you can have.

You and I have literally had the conversation about everything that happens between 27 and 37 and how it radically changes your life. And that is the theme of this movie. Yeah, it's very much about being out in the world and being able to be an adult without really knowing how to do it. And it's just kind of like, how can you possibly know if you're doing something right, if you're doing it for the first time? I mean, like that's what the entire movie turns on. I mean,

it's, but anyway, yeah, Jake Johnson's Peter Parker wears sweatpants and it's great. There are a few other spider characters that we should talk through. You know, I have not really been a reader of the comics in the last i don't know probably 10 plus years and so i'm not as familiar with some of these iterations um the idea of an alternate universe peter parker makes sense to me you know the idea of spider gwen gwen stacy being the person who

takes up the mantle of spider-man was surprising and cool. Haley Steinfeld voices that character. Miles and Gwen have a kind of a meet cute in their high school and their private, I don't know, is that like a charter school or something? I don't know what that school is that Miles attends. It's whatever that school is that Tom Holland attends in Spider-Man Homecoming. Is it the same school? I mean, like it's not the same school, but it's like the same vibe. Got it. In addition to addition to spider gwen who else do we meet um we meet penny um which is the anime spider-man that has a link with a telepathic

spider that lives in a robot of her deceased father sure that's normal sure um there is this movie is weird we should say it's super it's really weird super weird like you you are just gonna have to roll with it yes like but there's also spider-man noir voiced by nicholas cage incredible stuff it's oh man he's he's literally a black and white spider-man character dressed like humphrey bogart, talking like Humphrey Bogart, voiced by Nicolas Cage, but also Spider-Man. Yeah. And like just constantly saying the most morbid stuff. And like,

there's a really good gag with the Rubik's cube. You gotta, you, but anyway, you'll see that anyway. There's also Peter Porker, voiced by John Mulaney, which is just Spider-Man.

They basically are doing this bit where they're all going through their origin stories when they first all meet each other. And it's great because at the end, because everything, all the aspects of the story are the same and maybe a little different, but the words that they're using

are the same. But at the end of it is you can always hear pig it's funny casting nicholas cage and john mulaney and designing an anime character you know these characters come in a little bit later in the film they're obviously there for a kind of comic relief they and they help tell the story a little bit. But they are like internet writ large. You know, they're like memes on screen. I don't know if I've ever seen

a movie that got what's funny about something like that. That got, because you know, Spider Pig, is Spider Pig the name

of the character? Okay, Spider Pig is basically Porky Pig meets Bugs Bunny. Yeah, I mean like, he beats people

with a mallet and like, you know, produces anchors out of his pockets. You know? Yeah, he mean, like, he beats people with a mallet and, like, you know, produces anchors out of his pockets. You know? Yeah, he's a Looney Tunes character. And the movie that I kept thinking of, especially as this movie went on and it gets sort of more kaleidoscopic

and more strange and more fun and high energy is Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Have you seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Okay. So, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, of course, Robert Zemeckis' movie from the early 90s

in which, you know, cartoons, tunes live in the real world, the real sort of noir detective world of the 1930s and 40s in America. And what you have is this like fourth wall breaking thing where the idea of a character like Bugs Bunny actually exists in a world that you can interact with. Not a lot of movies have tried to do this. And I think it's because it's really difficult to pull off. It's really difficult to convince people that they should buy in on this joke. How do you think that this movie that also has all of this sincere tension

between father and son and identity and trying to figure out who you are as a young person in the world and who you are as an aging person in the world. And then with the pig. Yeah, balance it with the pig. Well, no, I mean, like, it's like you said, I mean, like, there's got to be a valve for, yeah, like, you know, some of this is just not that serious.

I mean, there's a sequence at the end of the movie where, like, something really dramatic happens. And then Peter Porker saves the day and it's funny like and it's just kind of like having that balance but also it works because the entire on-screen enterprise of spider-man is like part of the joke i mean like it's because there have been so many there's there's this is a thing that is permissible i mean, you definitely can't put Peter Porker in this movie if Andrew Garfield, Tobey Maguire, and

Tom Holland all play the character. There haven't been as many reboots and changes to it as there have been if the way that Marvel kind of uses like, oh, the Hulk is Korean-American, the Hulk is Korean American, Thor is a woman now,

but eventually everything returns to the white male character that it was before. You don't get to have these sort of jokes and have them work without having that kind of ass backwards way of doing things. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's an interesting year to examine the way that we kind of design our heroes too,

because I think on the one hand, you've got this major success of Black Panther, which obviously gave us kind of an, not a new way to tell this story, but a new face on the story, right? And that was obviously a massive, significant cultural event

for a lot of African-Americans, but also just, I think, for the movie industry in general to show like movies like this, not only can they work, but they could be the biggest possible version of this kind of movie. So that seemed important. On the other hand, if you look down the cast list on the Avengers,

you know, it's a lot of Chris's. It's a Scarlet. Literally all the Chris's. It's a Jeremy. You know, it's a lot of folks like that. And I don't think that readers or viewers necessarily want to be hit over the head with the idea that this has to be this sort of multicultural, multilingual world of heroes. But on the other hand, as you say, in the comic books, just by the by dint of

necessity to reinvent the characters, they've been redefining who they are and what they look like. And I'm wondering if you think a movie like this, in some ways, I don't know if you need to necessarily measure it against Black Panther, but accomplishes just as much by showing a multiplicity of approaches. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely not... I mean, it's not the same cultural phenomenon that Black Panther was, I mean, obviously. But in terms of representation and not doing it

in a way that feels forced or preachy in any way, it's just kind of a thing that is. Spider-Man is Miles Morales. Miles Morales is Spider-Man. It's a really First thing I see is Saladin Ahmed, who wrote the most recent run of Black Bolt Comics. He's also doing the Miles Morales comic that I think is coming out later this month. I'm not entirely sure, but anyway, he was just like, it's really cool that I got to go to McDonald's and get my kids toys that look like them and then also take them to a movie where the main character looks like them and I wrote the comic for this character and it's coming out best year but like you know it's something like that you know I mean yeah

being able to see yourself and not have to be like not have to do that extra step of like imagining that this you get to be this person is a small thing but a huge thing yeah i think also a movie like this is different than black panther which even if it's just around the marketing of the movie sort of necessarily had to be a cultural event there had to be a story to tell because there had never been a movie like that made by marvel with a movie like this is as say, it's just sort of accepted as fact. This is just what it is. It normalizes a thing that probably should have been normalized a long time ago. But as we know, these are really the coin of the realm in movies in the 21st century. And so the more movies we have like this, I feel like the better off they are. I want to talk a little bit about just the art of vocal performance. We talked about Jake Johnson

and just what a kind of a perfect bedraggled aging Spider-Man he is. We haven't mentioned Shameik Moore, who of course plays Miles Morales. People may know Shameik Moore from the get down. What else was he in? He was also in Dope. In Dope, that's right. Does he represent the voice that you heard in your head when you were reading the comic? Yeah, because it's kind of he is, basically he's a certain kind of confident. I mean, like, Peter Parker

is a nerd. You know? Miles Morales is just kind of not exactly popular not unpopular just cool and able to navigate you know like whatever i mean he's good with everybody he's good with everybody until he is then opened up into this this new kind of world that you know like he doesn't really know how to he doesn't really know how to navigate, but he's going to try anyway because he has to. And that sort of uncertainty within certainty of yourself,

the confidence of it. I love Shameik Moore's performance in this. Also, the way that I read Miles Morales' character, more so than Peter Parker, and I guess in a way that I particularly understood, is that he's just kind of, it's almost like he's a kid that was in the stands and snuck onto the field and managed to be able to play better

than everybody else that was playing. And the journey from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie where he's able to do all those things is believable and natural. That is sort of the literal arc of his character too, so it fits in perfectly. This also is a movie that has a performance from Mahershala Ali Oscar winner Brian Tyree Henry who I think the ringer thinks is probably the best working actor around right now

yeah uh you mentioned Lily Tomlin you mentioned Oscar winner Nicolas Cage we haven't mentioned Liev Schreiber who is just the god of vocal work from his times doing HBO sports documentaries to, of course, all of his performances as the actor Liev Schreiber to his work here as Wilson Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin. Also, Kimiko Glenn, who is Soso in Orange

is the New Black, voices Penny Parker. I mentioned Chris Pine, who's a huge movie star, who's doing like seven line readings in this movie. I mean, it's quite a lineup of vocal actors. Oh, shout out to Catherine Han, who plays Olivia Octavius, a.k.a. Doc Ock, and Zoe Kravitz, who's Mary Jane, and Lake Bell, who's Vanessa Fisk,

and Jorma Taccone, who's Green Goblin. It's just a fun parlor game like just get your friend who can give you three hours to do vocal work to come in and do this thing and it'll weirdly make your movie more entertaining if it's animated yeah yeah I mean like everybody should be tearing a page out of

Phil Lord's playbook can I give you a little rap facts as the host of the On Shuffle podcast? Yeah, go ahead. You're familiar with the character Tombstone. Yes. Who appears in this movie. One of Kingpin's henchmen in this movie.

He is voiced by Crandon. Wow. Because Crandon was also in... He was the villain in Luke Cage too. Yes, he was. He was. So somehow Crandon has managed to worm his way into the Marvel expanded universe. Strong arms, steady.

Yes. Wow. So music is alive, rap is alive in this movie in more ways than one. What else should we talk about? I mean, I think that sort of unlike Aquaman, which as soon as the movie ended, I was like, I can't believe I have to go do this again two years from now and go see Aquaman 2 and think about it and explain it. I found

myself excited to see what they do with this story. Yeah. There's already been rumblings about the Gwen Stacy movie. The ending sort of sets that up a little bit. But I,

after the movie was over, was not thinking about what the next thing might be it was just kind of like this was a great thing that happened and i'd be fine if there were no more of these because you know like what if they ruin it but also i mean like i guess it would be interesting to see where the story goes from here yeah and you know my know, my co-host on the Oscar show, Amanda Dobbins doesn't watch animated movies. She calls them cartoons, nor does our pal and colleague, Chris Ryan. So I'll never get a chance to talk to them about this aspect of the movie,

but this movie has won a lot of critics awards for best animated feature. Now, best animated feature over the years almost always goes to a Pixar movie. And this year, there's a great Pixar movie. And interestingly, that Pixar movie is about superheroes. It's called Incredibles 2. But Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse has now won, I believe, the LA Film Critics Circle and the New York Film Critics Circle, excuse me, LA Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Animated Feature. I don't know that a Spider-Man animated movie necessarily winning a Best Animated Feature Oscar is like a totemic event, but I now find myself rooting for it

for this strange, silly award. Would it mean anything for Into the Spider-Verse to win Best Animated Feature? I mean, sure. I mean, like it would would you would probably know better what the with the i guess industry ramifications of that would be but i mean i i guess i'm not exactly worried about whether or not it beats incredibles 2 for whatever just because again like i'm just so happy that the movie got made and it's as good as it is. But I do think that it would be just as important as if, it's just as important as movies like Black Panther invading the Oscars.

I mean, yeah, I am rooting for it, but just because it's good and if it doesn't win, at least it happened. One thing I was thinking about with this story, and it's related to what you've just mentioned, is the idea of a sideline animated version of a movie about a character that doesn't affect the long-term continuity of kind of the big cinematic universe is not new.

If you go on iTunes right now and you type in Avengers, you'll find not just the Avengers or the Avengers Age of Ultron or the Avengers Infinity War. You'll also find a bunch of other movies that are called The Avengers colon something that are animated that are not very good, but they're like sanctioned quasi kids movies that are loose adaptations of comic book storylines. DC's animated universe is better. Oh, interesting. Okay. So I don't watch these movies ever. It seems like you do. The thing I kept thinking last night is really the only dissonance I have,

and it doesn't make me like the movie any less, but the idea of not just one or even two, but maybe even three kind of ongoing Spider-Man universes to manage as a person covering movies on a week-to-week basis is a lot. Yeah. If I were paying more close attention to those animated movies that kind of go straight to VOD, maybe I would already have some sensibility about this. Do you think ultimately there's a problem with not just six or seven Spider people in a movie, but

six or seven Spider-Men ongoing at the same time? Or can movies exist essentially as comic books do, which is on different continuities and different timeframes? I think that movies can exist. I mean, whether or not I think they can or can't, they are going to, just because there's... Avengers Infinity War was a ridiculous enterprise. Asking somebody to have 19 films worth of knowledge in order to enjoy a three hour movie basically is a ridiculous thing to ask. Agree. But at the same time, Infinity War was as good as it was because it recreates the feeling of reading like a massive crossover event in a comic book. Yeah, these people die and yeah, they're still under contract. You know, they're going to be back in the next issue.

But you feel like what's happening on the page as it's happening. And that's fine, you know, and maybe you want to know more about this character. So you go find that title. Maybe you want to know more about this character. So you go find that title. And it's just, this is too lucrative for it not to be a thing where we're going to have all of these plates spinning at once. Who is, so let's say we get Spider-Gwen next. What's the third movie you want to see

based on the characters we've seen here? Or is there a character that we haven't seen that you think deserves his own Spider franchise? I kind of want to see a Spider-Man noir short. I don't want to see a whole movie with Nicolas Cage doing Rorschach. They should just remake to Have and Have Not, or Key Largo, or The Big Sleep, just with Spider-Man Noir. Just the same story, same characters, but it's just Spider-Man. Do you think that would work? Yeah, I think it could work.

I mean, it wouldn't be any less ridiculous than anything else. That's a great way to close this conversation. I believe Micah, you and I loved Spider-Man into the spider verse. Thank you for doing this. Of course. Thanks again for listening to this week's episode of the big picture for more on Spider-Man colon Into the Spider-Verse, check out TheRinger.com where Micah Peters, our guest on today's episode, has written about the movie. And you know, if you haven't been checking out the podcast lately, please rate and review it. We'd love to hear what

you think and what you want to hear more of. And if you didn't really check out any of their episodes this week, we had a really great week. Earlier in the week, we had Wesley Morrison talking about the best performances of 2018. And then just yesterday, I had Barry Jenkins in the studio and we talked about his wonderful new film, If Beale Street Could Talk. And we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of The Oscar Show with Amanda Dobbins. See you then.