Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 Title Revealed

As production continues on the second film in Sony’s Into the Spider-Verse franchise, the studio took to CCXP in Sao Paulo Saturday afternoon to reveal the official title for the upcoming sequel. Henceforth, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 is being called Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

The vast majority of the cast from the first film is expected to return to the follow-up, including Shameik Moore (Miles Morales) and Hailee Steinfeld (Spider-Gwen), and Jake Johnson (Peter B. Parker). Issa Rae has also been cast in the feature as Jessica Drew, the hero known as Spider-Woman.

Sony quickly rushed a sequel to Spider-Verse into development after the feature won the studio an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. According to producer Chris Miller, that win was a direct result of the film’s massively ambitious design.

“This is a situation where the movie was so ambitious, it was trying to do so many groundbreaking things in its visual style, in its storytelling style, in its cinematic style.” Miller previously explained to ComicBook.com. “Everything about it … The sound mix was probably going to be groundbreaking, so it required a lot of work. Every version of these movies is a collaboration of hundreds of filmmakers working together, and in the best versions people are contributing their creative ideas, and the people, the directors, and the producers are the ones that get to decide which of the things fit the road that you’re going down.”

A trio of new directors—Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson—have taken over the follow-up, replacing Bob Persichietti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Rothman co-wrote the script to the first feature alongside producer Phil Lord, while Lord, Miller, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings scribe David Callaham wrote the script for the follow-up.

According to Callaham, he began writing the script for the sequel before the first feature even came out.

“[Chris and Phil] said, ‘We have this animated Spider-Man movie we are doing.’ They were still working on the first movie,” Callaham told THR this past  September. ” They couldn’t tell me what it was going to look like. Because it’s them, I said, ‘I’ll come in and see what you have. I don’t get it.’ They showed me an animatic, which at the time looked like napkin drawings with temp vocals and no animation styling behind it. I could feel the heart behind it, but I couldn’t imagine how spectacular this thing could be yet. They showed me some still images of some of the art they had been working on. With them, I trust them implicitly and I believed they were going to do something special. I said, ‘OK,’ and they said, ‘Great. Pitch us a sequel.’ So I began the very strange process of working on the sequel for a year before the original came out.”

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part One is currently set for release on October 7, 2022.