Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was a hit when it swung into theaters earlier this year and excitement for the next instalment, Beyond the Spider-Verse, is through the roof. Unfortunately, it recently lost its March 2024 release date and is now "TBD" after an indefinite delay.
The sequel concluded with Miles Morales stranded on Earth-42, the home of the spider which bit him. However, as if that wasn't bad enough, the wall-crawler found himself held captive by that reality's Prowler: Miles G. Morales. Spider-Gwen, meanwhile, assembled a team of spider-heroes to find and help her friend.
Talking to Empire (via CBR), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse co-director Justin K. Thompson and producer Christopher Miller revealed the movie's ending was changed just six weeks before it was released.
In this earlier cut, Thompson says Gwen Stacy didn't bring together those fan-favourite web-slingers. "I was really worried about it until about six weeks before we finished the movie, and we added it. The movie kind of fell flat at the end and was really a bummer."
"We had a screening and thankfully we were able to come up with the strategy of how to bring all these characters back together, and bring the Spot back - because he didn’t come back - and show Rio and Jeff, and tag all the characters."
Miller adds, "We learned the same lesson that Empire Strikes Back learned. That movie used to end after he finds out the big twist and Han Solo gets taken away. They didn’t have the scene where he gets the new hand and they stare out at the star field. They did that as a reshoot, because they felt like they needed a little bit of hope for the next film. We learned that lesson."
"We were like, 'It’s a cliffhanger, it’s supposed to end on a thing where you’re like, 'Oh no!' So it ended with Miles meeting his alternate self and he’s trapped in an alternate dimension, oh no. But the audience really did need that moment of hope. Help is on the way," the filmmaker continues. "They’re gonna figure something out. If we were smarter, we would have learned that earlier."
It's no secret that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse's production was a gruelling process for those who worked on it and changing the ending last-minute can't have been easy. Still, it definitely sounds like it was to the movie's benefit as it featured a big enough cliffhanger as it was without making it unnecessarily grim to boot.
What did you think about Across the Spider-Verse's ending?