Invincible Showrunner Comments on Spider-Man Crossover

Invincible Season 2 is about to premiere on Amazon Prime Video – but could Marvel's Spider-Man be showing up in a surprise cameo? The two characters teamed up in Marvel Team-Up #14 back in 2006, which was then also canonized in Invincible #33. With that kind of history on the comic page, fans have been eager to see an animated crossover follow! 

There's been a rumor running about a Spider-Man/Invincible crossover since Season 2 of the Invincible animated series went into production – and showrunner Simon Racioppa isn't shooting down the possibility! 

In a new interview with The Hollywood Handle, Racioppa addressed the Invincible Season 2 Spider-Man cameo rumors by first talking about some broader hopes for crossover events: 

"I'd love to have crossovers with all, with DC, with Marvel, with all these other characters. I mean... in our show you gotta have to wait and see if that's a thing that can happen or not. I'd love that to happen, you know, is very tricky nowadays..." 

All those caveats aside, Racioppa did leave a window open for how Spider-Man could appear in the Invincible Universe, in terms of behind-the-scenes business deals: "Marvel they sometimes license their characters to other studios. So crossing over in television is way harder than it is in comic books."

Spider-Man is a particularly tricky character to manage: Sony owns a wide breadth of rights to character (live-action films and TV, some forms of animation) while Marvel owns a few key ones (comics, certain animated and film partnership rights, etc.). It's something of a knot to untangle figuring out how Marvel and/or Sony would partner with Amazon Studios and Image Comics for this crossover. It would also be interesting to know what the upside would be for Marvel. 

Sony Is Making Multiple Spider-Man TV Shows

The most obvious advantage would be getting viewers ready for the new Spider-Man series that Amazon Prime Video and MGM are developing, which includes Silk: Spider Society and a Spider-Man Noir series. 

Silk will be produced by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse's Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who signed an overall deal to develop Spider-Man-themed TV shows for Sony, including Spider-Man Noir.

"We are so grateful to everyone at Sony Pictures Television for choosing to partner with us and expand our enduring relationship with the studio," Lord and Miller said in a statement when that deal was first announced. "Together we aim to make groundbreaking work of the highest quality and integrity, and to place that work in convenient proximity to your eyeballs and earholes, wherever you may be."

Invincible Season 2 premieres on Friday, November 3rd on Prime Video.