Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Producer Reveals the Real Villain in the Film

One of the filmmakers behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has a pretty funny response to an odd-looking background character who was singled out by the Sony Pictures Animation TikTok account as a potential "true villain" of the film. In a short video promoting the film's original score, Sony Pictures Animation shared a shot of a background character with a vacant, vaguely creepy smile, captioning it as "the real villain in Miles's universe." That was enough to bring the comedy out of Chris Miller, who by nature is pretty prone to comedy anyway, as you might have noticed from projects like The Lego Movie and Clone High.

The comments below both entries are pretty perfect, actually, and show that the audience had a similar reaction to the character that's pretty similar to the jokey one Sony brought to the table. And so does Miller.

"He's smiling because he knows," the filmmaker joked.

You can see it below.

@sonypicturesanimation

the real villain in miles’s universe #spiderverse #sonyanimation

♬ Spider Verse Original Score Available Now - Sony Animation

He’s smiling because he knows... https://t.co/lOlwSTPxCB

— Christopher Miller (@chrizmillr) December 3, 2020

After a stellar box office run that ended up resulting in an Academy Award for Sony Pictures Animation, Sony quickly pushed Spider-Verse 2 into development. That's in addition to the female-led spin-off the studio had reportedly also started to develop. When we spoke to producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, they expressed interested in creating their own animated universe in and of itself. As one of the producers said, the original Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was but the tip of the iceberg.

"Look, we wanted to make a movie that felt like it was the tip of the iceberg," Lord explained. "You could imagine all of these other things. So it's music to our ears that people could imagine a Spider-Noir film, and the Spider-Ham insane cartoon."

"Right. We still have the horse," Miller added. "We've got to put the cart behind it. So we'll let it ride down the road a few blocks before we get too big for our britches."

In a separate interview, the two teased a whole lot of characters they'd want to introduce in subsequent features.

"I think there's a bunch [of possible characters], and I don't want to say too much because there's a wide breadth of characters that are coming out of the Spider-Man universes now." Miller explained. "And it's really fun to be able to sort of think about plucking ones that you haven't seen before or have something interesting thematic to say."

Into the Spider-Verse ended up grossing north of $375.5 million in its box office run, showing on 3,813 screen at the height of its run.

The sequel is set to be released in October 2022.