‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ Director Compares Pivotal Scene to ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’

It’s not just you — the team from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse acknowledges that one of the movie’s funniest scenes feels an awful like something out of Weekend at Bernie’s.

When Miles Morales first meets the film’s Peter Parker, Miles accidentally delivers a Venom Strike to Peter, knocking him out. As a consequence, Peter involuntarily fires a web and the pair are stuck together. When the police show up, they get chased, a web attaches to a passing train and they are thrown into this wild ride through Manhattan.

“It’s their first scene together, but Peter Parker is unconscious through most of the scene,” director Bob Persichetti says in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – The Art of the Movie. “We tried to lean into the fun of a kid Spider-Man and a grown man Spider-Man. We joked that it was kind of born out of the spirit of the 1989 movie Weekend at Bernie’s. Peter is unconscious, and Miles is puppeting him as they get dragged through Manhattan.”

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Weekend at Bernie’s was a comedy starring Jonathan Silverman, Andrew McCarthy, and Terry Kiser. In the film, a pair of young employees at an insurance company (McCarthy and Silverman) uncover a massive embezzlement scheme and go to CEO Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser) to report it. Lomax invites the pair to his beach house to go over the details with him, but unbeknowst to them, Bernie is the embezzler, and puts a price on their heads with the mob. Before they can arrive, one of Bernie’s mob connections has him killed, and when the pair get to the beach house to find their boss dead, hijinks ensue and the pair end up trying to maintain the illusion that he is still alive, often by manipulating the body into doing just enough to be convincing from a distance, so that they can have a weekend of the lavish luxury that was Bernie’s lifestyle.

Ironically, while Peter was not dead in the Spider-Verse scene, part of the reason that Miles was being pursued by the police was that he appeared to be, so the Weekend at Bernie’s connection is pretty apt.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is in theaters now.

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