In the beginning, even Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sounded a little tired of superhero movies. “OK, let’s do this one more time,” the 2018 movie’s hero implored its audience, like an emcee trying to revive a sluggish crowd. Look, it seemed to say, we’ve all been here before: kid gets bitten by a bug, gets superpowers, has to balance the demands of an ordinary life with the responsibilities of a costumed crimefighter. But this time will be different, promise.
It was different, and not only because this particular Spider-Man was an Afro-Latino kid from Brooklyn instead of a white kid from Queens. Animated instead of live-action, self-contained instead of being slotted into an interlocking narrative universe, shifting styles and planes of existence, the movie crackled with a sense of possibility.
If you grew up reading comics, the sensation was familiar, of stepping into a world where anything that flowed from an artist’s pen could feel real and wondrous at the same time. Not only could anyone be Spider-Man—in the Spider-Verse, anyone was: a mad scientist from the future, a Japanese girl in a giant mecha suit, even a cartoon pig named Peter Porker. It was as if the filmmakers had been let loose in a toy store and told they could grab anything they wanted, tottering towards the checkout line with arms piled high.
Into the Spider-Verse’s sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, goes back for an even bigger armful. Instead of dozens of Spider-Beings, there are hundreds, including a cat, a T-Rex, and an anthropomorphized vehicle named Peter Parkedcar. But the more alternate realities the movie spans, the more it emphasizes what binds these heroes together rather than what sets them apart. One might be an Indian in the fusion metropolis of Mumbattan, one a punk rocker with an electric guitar and a Cockney accent, but their lives are variations on a theme, a mixture of superhuman abilities and all-too-human failings, set on their path by a personal tragedy that underlines the cost of not doing the right thing.
Across the Spider-Verse calls these parallel milestones “canon events,” the commonalities that link the vast web of Spider-people across universes. Miles finds himself fighting the idea that the life of a Spider-Man has to go a certain way, that stepping outside the canon—a term the movie pointedly appropriates from fan culture—is something the universe can simply not abide. But he’s not just challenging the laws of his own world. He’s locked in a battle with the most implacable of foes: intellectual property.
Although its imagination seemed boundless, Into the Spider-Verse was actually playing in a sandbox surrounded by hundred-foot walls, boundaries set by the ownings of Sony Pictures. Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man exists in the same world as the Avengers and the X-Men, but in the movies, the rights are held by different entities. Or at least they were, until Disney, which owns the Marvel Cinematic Universe, acquired 20th Century Fox, which owned the X-Men and the Fantastic Four, and Sony worked out a deal allowing Tom Holland’s Peter Parker to exist in both their corporate world and the MCU. When Disney bought Fox, some fans processed the massive agglomeration of entertainment industry power as if its primary import were that Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine might get to hang out with Chris Hemsworth’s Thor.
But that’s what it’s come to in the age of IP Cinema, when so much of studio filmmaking amounts to being handed a box of assorted action figures and asked, “So, what can you do with these?” The ultimate reward for success isn’t getting to tell your own stories; it’s getting hired on to tell someone else’s. Three-time Oscar nominee Greta Gerwig’s Barbie looks like a lot of fun, and after the luminous visuals of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, one can hope Barry Jenkins will make grand use of the unlimited digital palette of his prequel to The Lion King. But despite the fact that their new movies will reach audiences several times larger than their previous work’s, it’s increasingly difficult to applaud the increase in scale without noting the compromises that come along with it, the movies that might have been made instead.
The problem isn’t filmmakers taking on bigger and more elaborate projects. It’s that, increasingly, there’s only one kind of big project the movie industry is interested in, a new genre that starts with running down a list of the properties the studio already owns before mashing them together. Movies like Ready Player One and Space Jam: A New Legacy function less as stories and more as guided tours of Warner Bros’ intellectual property vaults; Marvel’s Fantastic Four movie—another fruit of the Fox acquisition—might still be years away, but they wasted no time dropping a multiversal double of Mr. Fantastic into the latest Doctor Strange, just to prove they could. Spider-Man: No Way Home gathered Tom Holland’s, Andrew Garfield’s, and Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parkers together like a collector showing off a complete set, a nifty feat of scheduling if not much else, and Warners’ forthcoming The Flash, which use its multiverse-hopping to suck Michael Keaton’s Batman into DC’s rebooted cinematic universe, looks to be taking a similar tack. IP also has its own origin stories now, in movies like Air, Flamin’ Hot, Blackberry, and Tetris, where humans are overshadowed by the iconic brands they created. Even Free Guy, a movie that frames franchise culture as the death of individuality, ends with its hero brandishing a lightsaber and Captain America’s shield.
What matters in IP Cinema isn’t whether a property is attached to a good story, or any story at all—the ideal properties have no authors to meddle in the creative process. All that matters is that it tickles our hippocampi with an itch of recognition, something to make it stand out in the endless river of content. Name a movie after a board game or a toy or a lunchbox and you no longer have to worry about potential ticket-buyers going What was that called again?
The most pop-savvy creators have learned to turn this environment to their advantage, and no one has made a more productive career of it than Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. With 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, as well as their sequels and spinoffs, they not only made sport but made hay of the creative vacuum of the IP era. The Lego Movie actually turns the practice of making story from a bucket of plastic blocks into its emotional core; its chief villain, voiced by Will Ferrell, is revealed to be the imaginatively straitjacketed father of the boy who’s been acting out the entire movie in his basement playroom. They weren’t so free on Solo: A Star Wars Story, fired and replaced midway through production for taking too many liberties with one of Disney’s most valuable characters. But the Spider-Verse movies—Lord co-wrote the first, he and Miller share screenplay credit on the second, and the duo produced both—strike a balance between doing justice to one of an iconic character’s most significant iterations and pushing back against, or least triple-underlining, the restrictions that come with knowing the studio’s prized asset has to be returned in like-new condition.
Across the Spider-Verse finds Miles Morales pushing against some of those restrictions himself, with callbacks to Sony’s previous live-action movies reminding us that not so long ago the only question about who would be the next Spider-Man was which floppy-haired white man would play Peter Parker. And the fact that it’s both animated and separate from the MCU allows the movie’s directors, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson, to develop a thrilling range of visual looks and distinctive rhythms—there’s no house style to match, because there’s no house. The movie is generous almost to a fault, its two-plus hours stuffed with so many sight gags and narrative diversions that its exhilaration threatens to turn to exhaustion—and the story is only half done, cutting off abruptly with a “to be continued” that points to next March’s Beyond the Spider-Verse. (At least when comic books left you hanging, they only did it for a month.) But its triumph just makes the thought of slogging back to the multiplex to see another once-promising auteur’s attempt to make magic with someone else’s toys even harder to contemplate. Everyone gets to stick their hands in the toy box, but they still have to play by the rules.
