The following story is going to get into spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. So if you haven’t yet seen the movie, and want to go in as pure as possible, back out now and go read one of our other stories on the site.
It was the first moment in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that I started to cry. Marvel legend Stan Lee appeared in the original film as a person working behind the counter of a costume shop. He’s the one who hands Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) his store-bought Spider-Man costume, reminding the young hero that it always fits, eventually. It’s a big part of the reason why Into the Spider-Verse ranks so high on our list of every Spider-Man movie, ranked. But it wasn’t just that shot. The animators working on that film all wanted to work Lee into the film, so they snuck the creator into countless scenes, including the moment when Miles says “Thanks, New York!” Pause it, and you can see Stan Lee walking over the hero.
So, did Phil Lord and Chris Miller continue the tradition and work Stan Lee into the mesmerizing Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse? The short answer is no. But when Phil Lord and Chris Miller appeared on CinemaBlend’s ReelBlend podcast to talk Across the Spider-Verse, Lord elaborated on why they decided to leave Stan Lee out of the movie, explaining:
We made a choice that it felt a bit macabre. And exploitive to put someone in a movie when they could no longer offer permission. So that was just our choice. Every once in a while, we second-guessed it just because we suspected that he would've been delighted. (laugh) But in any case, he is all over the movie in many ways. The thing that's extraordinary is that what he and Steve Ditko came up with is so salient and resonant that it has replicated itself! It's such a powerful idea that one of these heroes is just as scared and vulnerable and clumsy and silly as any of us are. It's resilient enough to drive the storylines of a thousand different spider people. So the variations on it, the variations on a theme are so, I don't know. To me that's so interesting.
It goes without saying that the ideals worked into the character of Peter Parker and his alter ego, Spider-Man, have been resilient enough to sustain multiple interpretations in comics, movies, video games, TV shows and more. There’s a reason I wrote an entire book about Spider-Man’s Hollywood history. No other character can claim to have the impact on our culture that Spider-Man continues to have.
But even though Stan Lee enjoyed a decade of Marvel cameos in live-action MCU stories, the trend had to come to an end, and the reasoning behind leaving him out of the new movie makes so much sense. Here’s our full interview with Phil Lord and Chris Miller on the ReelBlend podcast. It’s a must listen:
We will continue to have so much coverage about the Spider-Verse world, including the scene from Into that had to be retconned ahead of the new movie, and those Spider-Ham jokes that had to be pulled from the final cut.
