Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s Phil Lord and Chris Miller wants to give you ‘something you’ve never seen before’

The first movie was a massive critical and commercial hit. How do you top that? You push even more boundaries.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in cinemas now.

Have you ever watched a kids’ movie – ahem, sorry, family film – and thought, “Wow, that was narratively complex, how could a 12-year-old understand what’s going on?”

Turns out, the adults are the dummies.

During early test screenings for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, the kids fared better than their parents.

“You’d be surprised. It was kids who understood it best. We actually put things in so that their parents could follow the story,” co-writer and producer Phil Lord told news.com.au.

A sequel to the 2018 smash hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse is a kaleidoscopic and ambitious coming-of-age story starring Miles Morales, a version of the webbed superhero.

Miles has to battle a new foe named The Spot, but his real war is with finding his place in the world – actually, make that many worlds because it’s a multiverse. The multiverse is so in vogue in the superhero canon and you better get used to it.

Miles Morales falls into the Spider-Verse. Picture: Sony

The multiverse is at stake, with Miles pulled into a chaotic mission to save all the worlds alongside alternate Spider-People Gwen Stacey, Jessica Drew, Hobie Brown and Peter J. Parker. But laced in between that is the conflict he has with his parents and with himself.

Lord’s creative partner, Chris Miller, added with a laugh, “It’s true. [The story] is very relatable to [younger audiences]. Miles is a guy who feels lonely. He wants to go hang out with his friends, he wants to go to the cool party with the cool people.

“He feels like his parents aren’t letting him spread his wings and leave the nest. These are all very relatable concepts for kids and for parents.

“There’s all the whiz-bang cool action stuff, but all of the character stories are grounded in parent-child relationships.”

Lord and Miller are a formidable force in the industry, having either written, produced or directed hits including 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, Cocaine Bear and The Mitchells and the Machines.

Their acumen for picking broad-appeal movies with a streak of irreverent fun have made their names synonymous with the playful genre.

When the first Spider-Verse movie was released in 2018, not only was it lauded for centring the biracial Miles as the lead in a superhero story, and also for pushing the boundaries in its visually inventive animation.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller are a formidable creative force in Hollywood. Picture: Valerie Macon/AFP

The hype that followed, including a 97 per cent Rotten Tomatoes score and an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, was an incredible ride, but also set up near-impossible expectations for the sequel.

“You just have to take the same level of risk,” Lord said. “You know the audience is here to be surprised and our obligation is to present something that they’ve never seen before.

“You have to think of a wholly original way to tell the story, which is why the movie is structured the way that it is and the reason why we tried to get deeper into the characters and present them as more sophisticated, multi-layered people. We wanted to get underneath their relationships with their families.”

Miller added that it was also important to break more barriers on a visual level by introducing yet new worlds, so that each would have a unique animation style and visual language. Miller likened it to walking into a different painting.

In particular, he was excited to introduce the audience to Spider-Punk and Spider-Man India’s worlds.

“Seeing Spider-Man Punk’s world was a really special challenge visually just to make it look like a photocopied punk zine collage type of thing, but to have that work in three dimensions and be its own thing was a really fun one to pull off.

“And we got so excited when we started to see footage come in from Mumbattan, which was inspired by these comic books that were printed in India in the seventies and eighties and had their own colour palette and style onto themselves.

“This is a journey that the audience will come out of, going, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that before’.”

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is in cinemas now