Bob Persichetti, a director of Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, concedes that the audience bar is rising ahead of the third outing in the Oscar-decorated blockbuster franchise.
“Expectations are kind of limitless and we have to try to meet them,” he told Sony Pictures Animation President Kristine Belson with a grin during a panel discussion at the Crunchyroll Anime Future Forum.
Even though the chat took place at the Javits Center, where New York Comic Con will be held over the next few days, the point of the session was not plot teases or fan service. (Persichetti did show attendees the same work-in-progress footage from the film that screened at Cinema Con in April but Sony is holding back for now on an official teaser for the June 2027 release.)
The discussion instead focused on process and also, in keeping with the theme across other Crunchyroll sessions, about creating an animated work that draws on a multitude of influences but retains its originality.
Belson asked Persichetti, who directs the films with Justin K. Thompson, about how things have changed since the first installment in 2018.
“There were all these questions of, like, ‘Wait, who is it really for?!’” he recalled. “Because it’s not an outright comedy. There’s going to be action in it and Spider-Man guys – what are you doing?! And I think it was at that moment when we were in the room together and we screened it. It was made very clear to us that, ‘Oh, we have been underestimating the general audience for a long time in terms of what the sophistication of an animated film can be.’”
The first film wound up winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature en route to a global box office haul of $395 million. The follow-up, Across the Spider-Verse, took in $690.5 million in 2023 and was nominated for Best Animated Feature, losing out to The Boy and the Heron.
Since the franchise left its unique mark, Persichetti said, “The animation industry is going, ‘Oh, you can make choices that seem unorthodox and still make money and still succeed.’”
In the sequel, he said, “we piled on like five different looks and wondered if it was working and people said, ‘not only is it working, but we want more,’” the director said. “What we learned is that the audience is fine with the image changing every shot. … That’s ultimately how we were able to do so many things in one movie. The narrative throughline was creating this incredible visual extravagance.”
Technology has evolved dramatically since a decade ago when the franchise began. The filmmakers and crew are “seeing more creative choices” at a preliminary stage of the process, Persichetti said. “We’re able to think about a movie, holistically, creatively, much earlier.”
The collaborative way of making the film revolves around keeping an open mind, with writer/producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in the mix and material taken from real-life experiences. For all of its visual energy, Persichetti said, the original film “was really a movie, in my eyes, that was about Miles and his family. It was also sort of a love letter to New York. It’s also a love letter to hip-hop music and, ultimately, a love letter to Spider-Man.”
The filmmakers have “never said no to an idea,” the director continued. “If it’s an idea we’re doing in the movie, it will be stress-tested repeatedly, and then maybe the real idea ends up being not that thing but pieces of the stuff, pieces of that idea might fall into place on something else.”
The breakthrough of the first film earned the directors considerable leeway, Perischetti said. “We are very fortunate because we’re now on our third movie. The first two movies were successful, and the studio trusts us to make these movies. So we get to explore, probably way more than others do. But I will say, even on that first movie, we were exploring things that nobody believed in, and at first we weren’t even sure worked.”
