Animation fans, this one is for you. Phil Lord and Chris Miller have shared new details about the production of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, and the techniques they described sound like a real shake-up for how a CG feature gets made.
Speaking on a live episode of The Town with Matthew Belloni, recorded at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the duo explained that the third film is not simply a bigger version of what came before. Instead, the team has rebuilt parts of the pipeline from scratch.
A Flat, Layered Look on Purpose
Each Spider-Verse film has been a style experiment. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse mixed CG models with comic print textures, held frames and drawn line work, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse gave each universe its own visual language, from Gwen's watercolor Earth-65 to the punk collage of Hobie Brown. According to Lord and Miller, Beyond the Spider-Verse moves even further from the usual CG playbook.
"The particular looks that we're doing are really, really unique, and they don't follow rules of three-dimensional animation. They're much more in a 2D multiplane kind of style."
For anyone who has studied classic animation, that word carries weight. The multiplane camera, made famous by Walt Disney Productions in the 1930s, separated painted backgrounds and character cels onto glass layers set at different depths. Moving the camera through those layers created parallax and depth while every element stayed a flat piece of art. Bringing that sensibility into a modern CG production points to a film built from layered, illustrated planes rather than fully modeled 3D spaces, which could make the new worlds feel even closer to a hand-drawn page.
Real Operators in a Virtual Space
The second big change is in cinematography. Camera moves in CG animation are usually built by layout artists one keyframe at a time. On this film, the team is treating the camera more like a live-action shoot.
"The camera work pipeline is completely new and a lot more akin to a live-action pipeline. So it's a lot more handheld."
Virtual production tools let operators hold a physical rig and film inside a digital set, with their real movements driving the virtual camera. That is the approach Lord and Miller described for the new film.
"There's live action operators that are part of it, like shooting things virtually."
The director of photography is Alice Brooks, a live-action cinematographer whose credits include Wicked, Wicked: For Good and tick, tick... BOOM!. Pairing a handheld, human camera with flat, multiplane-style art is an unusual combination, and it could give the film a raw, documentary-like energy that neither previous entry had. The pair said the results so far are outstanding.
Why It Takes So Long
The comments came up while Belloni asked why Spider-Verse movies take years to make, and the answer is right there in the process. Building new looks for each world, then inventing a new way to shoot them, adds a huge amount of development time on top of an already demanding style. Across the Spider-Verse arrived in 2023, and the conclusion to Miles Morales' story has been in production ever since.
Animated Spider-Man is thriving on the small screen too, with Marvel Animation confirming that Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man has seasons 3 and 4 in the works for Disney+.
Release Date
Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse opens in US theaters on June 18, 2027, over Father's Day weekend, from Sony Pictures Animation. The full Lord and Miller interview, which also covers Project Hail Mary and their exit from the Han Solo movie, is available on The Ringer.
Do you think a handheld camera and a 2D multiplane look will make Beyond the Spider-Verse the best-looking film of the trilogy?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.