Actor Shameik Moore, who voices Spider-Man Miles Morales in the upcoming Across the Spider-Verse animated film, says he's optimistic about perhaps playing the hero in a live-action film one day.
"My parents were optimistic about my future. I've been optimistic about every step of my life up till now and I will remain optimistic," he says.
The first film, 2018's Into the Spider-Verse, received critical acclaim and won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
It was lauded for its boundary-pushing animation, humour and story. Sony Pictures started thinking about the sequel as soon as the first film was completed, according to the film's production notes.
"I just feel lucky to be a vessel for this," Moore told the ABC.
His character, Miles Morales, is a half black, half-Puerto Rican Spider-Man who gains his powers from a spider bite in the first film.
"Representation is so important. You really can't put it into words — it's more of a feeling and life experience. Something to that adds to your growth," Moore says.
Across the Spider-Verse is an emotional universe-skipping story that sees heroes Gwen Stacey and Morales reunited as they contend with what's known as the Spider-Society, and are forced to face a new inter-dimensional threat.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the writing team behind films including 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, wrote this sequel.
"We thought in the first movie we were telling a story of Miles in being a kid becoming a teenager and we thought this would be a story about a teenager becoming an adult," Miller told the ABC.
"We started thinking about what are the things that kids are going through at that time where they're starting to separate from their parents.
"They want to leave the nest, they want to find, you know, validation from their friends and outside, elsewhere.
"And that seemed like a good way to start a story and to have it be a story where, you know, Gwen gets invited to the cool kids party and Miles doesn't — seem like a really relatable way to tell that story — to tell a superhero story that's really for everybody."
The voice cast includes Steinfeld, Moore, Issa Rae, Daniel Kaluuya, Jake Johnson and Oscar Isaac. Steinfeld, known for her role as Kate Bishop in the Marvel show Hawkeye, plays Gwen Stacey/Spider-Woman.
"The main difference is one's animation, one's live action. The preparation is rather similar, the process is completely different," Steinfeld says.
"I can't say I have a preference. I feel incredibly lucky that I get to do both."
Dimension Hopping
One major location is Mumbattan, an ultra-modern mashup of Manhattan and Mumbai and a new dimension that introduces Pavitr Prabhakar as that world's Spider-Man.
"There's a lot of back and forth and we're adding lines to the movie to support choices that the animators have made," Lord says.
"Quite a bit of influence was provided onto the Mumbattan sequence by the animators in Canada, many of whom are of Indian heritage, and they have a lot of great ideas for how to make Pavitr and his world authentic and fun and cool."
A point the filmmakers focused on was that heroes exist in all cultures and abilities.
There are hundreds of different Spider-people present in the film, including a hijab-wearing Spidey, those who are wheelchair users and countless versions of Spider-Man mined from decades worth of comics, cartoons and movies.
"[The] Spider people have different levels of ability in this film, you know, and the disabled community are some of the least well represented in movies and television," Lord says.
"So we're also trying to make sure that that's a part of it."
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in Australian cinemas June 1.
