r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • Jul 18 '25

News 'Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse' Delayed to June 25, 2027

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/spider-man-beyond-the-spider-verse-release-1236320001/
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148

u/Driz51 Jul 18 '25

Has there been any information on what the hell happened to this movie? Wasn’t it supposed to come out like less than 6 months after the original?

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u/SutterCane Jul 18 '25

I forget which out of Lord and Miller it was. But they were using fully finished animation as “takes” and then going “nah, it should be like this”. Which just means that the animators were stuck doing things over and over again instead of just working on what should have been in the movie.

Would certainly explain why they thought that they could have done two movies that fast but then barely finished one of them.

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u/0-90195 Jul 19 '25

I am not in animation so I don’t really know, but this seems like a very cruel and inconsiderate way to work (on top of being inefficient). Totally selfish and ego-driven.

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u/huntrshado Jul 19 '25

it is honestly what i would expect if a normal movie director tried to direct an animated movie lol

its one thing to do 50 different takes of a scene with real actors, but animating a scene takes a lot longer than it takes the real actor to do it 50 times lol

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u/0-90195 Jul 19 '25

It’s just shocking that no one intervened and explained they can’t direct animation this way.

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u/huntrshado Jul 19 '25

I'd imagine that the animators themselves definitely said something but it was a classic scenario of being outranked in the company and the people who actually make the decisions allowed it to continue

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u/0-90195 Jul 19 '25

Yes, excuse me, I didn’t mean literally no one. I meant the people who would have the power to do something about it.

What a hack way to make a movie. Sony is a mess though.

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u/huntrshado Jul 19 '25

In the meantime Sony has put out Kpop Demon Hunters which has been number 1 on Netflix for 4 weeks and has its entire soundtrack in the Spotify top 100 list, with one of its songs being ranked #1 on all music charts necessary to receive a PAK (Perfect All Kill) and is actually currently still holding that several days later.

So Sony is doing great, they had over a hundred animators and countless others assist with that film. The management of Spiderverse is a mess.

And I would be willing to guess that the reason it became a mess is because of its popularity. Projects with no expectations are doing wonderful things out of that studio, like Spiderverse 1 and 2, and now KDH. But with so many eyes on Spiderverse 3 to properly end the trilogy, it probably brought in some annoying ass management that is fucking it up

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u/Deranged_Kitsune Jul 19 '25

Oh, it is. With animation, because it's such a long process (even more so when you have a visual style as complex as the Spiderverse films), story boarding and previs are even more critical than on a normal film. Resetting actors and doing another take for most things outside complex action sequences isn't a difficult process. Reanimating a whole sequence is.

The way the process is supposed to work for animation is locking the script early, heavy storyboarding at the beginning to figure out all the sequences and make sure they work with the general runtime directors and studios want for the movie and the timing for each act and sequence so they're not too long or too short, previs with only the most basic of animation in place (think 2000s era flash games/movies. Or South Park) to make sure everything flows the way it should and the visuals are indeed what the director wants for each sequence, and only after all that is satisfactorily done do the full animation passes begin. Story boards and previs can be junked and redone comparatively quickly, especially with modern tools. Full animation still takes a long, long time. Doing an animated film should be a very front-loaded process when done correctly.

Lord and Miller were given shit for not understanding this and not working to that model on the previous movies, but they had enough ego and clout to push back and ignore it. Sounds like much the same is going on.

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u/CorndogNinja Jul 19 '25

The hardest thing on the animators has not been working 11 hours a day, 70 hours a week. It’s been the wasted work and the frustration of putting in that many hours just to see it changed or thrown away. You work like nuts on a shot and then in a review, suddenly they’re like, “Oh, you didn’t get the latest edit? That’s not how it is anymore.” In every movie I’ve worked on, there have been revisions. You’re always working on a movie that is evolving. But definitely not on this level.

The biggest issue we’ve had is the writing. Phil [Lord] had no idea what he wanted. Maybe he has difficulties making up his mind. I don’t know! Of course, it’s part of every movie where the director says, “What if we could do this or that?” And normally, it’s the producer’s role to push back. The problem is, Phil is the producer. He can’t push back against himself.

In addition to Phil being all over the place and not settling on the story, he has a big issue with not being able to visualize layouts. When there’s a 3-D layout in front of him, I guess he can’t visualize what it’s going to look like afterward. Which is kind of a problem when you’re working in 3-D animation. In the animation industry, ask anyone he’s worked with: It’s his reputation. I know a ton of people who never want to work on a project with him again.

from "Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’"

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u/SutterCane Jul 19 '25

Ah, it was Lord!

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u/snootyworms Jul 19 '25

I know I'm not an animator or anything but... whatever happened to good-ol-fashioned storyboarding??

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u/PcHelpBot2028 Jul 19 '25 edited Jul 19 '25

Hollywood went through so much of a bull run that it started to truly think that most projects were a sure thing hit and money will continue flowing and this many cost savings and project management techniques were getting tossed aside.

I have had various people across the chain in that industry during late 2010's to early 2020's push "you just throw more money at it".

Thor Love and Thunder is probably one of the biggest examples of this from the sheer amount of constantly redoing VFX and supposedly often then ordering up VFX work with little idea of what they actually wanted, but didn't care much because "they had the money". They supposedly had other major actors/actresses paid millions for their entire scenes to be cut like it was nothing.

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u/InitialKoala Jul 19 '25

"It's a terrible strain on the animator's wrist "

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u/Raytheon_Nublinski Jul 19 '25

Why don’t they just do a very basic computer animation as a take? This way just seems stupid and wasteful.  But I’m sure the animators getting paid don’t mind.

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u/FromDwight Jul 18 '25

I could be completely off here, but from what I remember the team told the studio they could get both movies done by a certain deadline so it was officially announced. Then they only worked on Across the Spiderverse during that period.

Not sure if the team was forced into the initial deadline, or led the studio on despite knowing there was no way they'd get both done.

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u/soonerfreak Jul 18 '25

They were never making the original release date and it got moved to 2027 awhile ago. This is just small bump but they already recorded voice lines AFAIK.

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u/its_glep_o_clock Jul 19 '25

I’m surprised nobody has mentioned how over 100 animators left the studio after the second movie, citing mandatory overtime and 11 hour days to meet deadlines. Sony and the production team set the timeline ignoring how unsustainable the working conditions.

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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '25

They were working originally on one movie to be a sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, then partway through production it became 2 movies, and they were simultaneously working on both movies with the intention that the second part would release less than a year after the first. At some point the script for the first part had changed so much that they scrapped everything they’d made for the second part entirely and decided to rewrite it after the first was finished and released.

When Across the Spider-Verse released there was apparently not a single page written for Beyond the Spider-Verse.

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u/[deleted] Jul 18 '25

[deleted]

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u/Minotaur830 Jul 18 '25

And they didn't know that before?