Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Producer Reveals Deleted Post-Credits Scene

By Cameron Bonomolo

[Warning: This story contains Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse spoilers.] Phil Lord and Chris Miller were in a tough spot over the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse post-credits scene. Originally announced as a "part one," the Spider-Verse sequel leaves off on a cliffhanger that won't be resolved until 2024's Beyond the Spider-Verse: Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) ends up marooned in the multiverse on Earth-42, where an alternate-universe Miles is the costumed criminal known as the Prowler. Worse, it's a reality without a Spider-Man — one where Miles' soon-to-be police captain father Jefferson Morales (Brian Tyree Henry) is dead, and his career criminal uncle Aaron Davis (Mahershala Ali) is the Prowler's (still alive) accomplice.

Elsewhere, Miles' self-proclaimed nemesis — the multiverse-traversing supervillain known as The Spot (Jason Schwartzman) — has accumulated enough power to prove himself as a multiversal threat and a worthy adversary to the Spider-Man of his home reality, Earth-1610. The spot-covered criminal spends the movie determined to use his "holes" — that is, the inky black interdimensional portals that comprise his body after an accident with the Alchemax collider — to become a serious threat.

In one unfinished scene cut from the movie, the Spot goes unnoticed at a supervillain hangout before "he finally steals the drink for himself and he pours it down and it all leaks out of his holes," Lord told IndieWire. "He's the dorkiest villain. A great line that Chris wrote, though: 'Trying to fill a hole in his heart with more holes.' Not a great method."

The gag would have paid off with a stinger set after the Spot masters his portals to travel universes. In the proposed post-credits scene, the Spot would go where nobody knows his name: the supervillain bar where he was earlier dismissed. Only this time, the Spot would use his newfound powers to easily defeat the villains who treated him like a joke.

"That was one of my favorite things, seeing this guy get picked on and then come back and, with just a whisper, demolishes every person that comes at him," said head of character animation Alan Hawkins. "But you have to have both of those sequences for that to work." (While it's unclear which villains might have appeared in the sequence, lesser-known Spider-Man villains like Armadillo, Grizzly, Typeface, and Video Man all make cameos throughout the film.)

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In the end, the Spider-Verse sequel omitted a traditional post-credits scene in favor of a title card declaring that Miles Morales will return in Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, scheduled to open in theaters on March 29th, 2024. On the lack of a post-credits tag, Lord said of the cliffhanger ending: "Hard to beat where we left off." 

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now playing in theaters. 

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