After the massive weekend success of Sony Animation’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, many rival studios are looking at executing their comic book IP differently on the big screen. Quite often, animated superhero projects are released directly to the home (think Warner Bros-DC’s myriad superhero toon movies like 2010’s Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam and Disney+/Marvel Studios’ avant-garde series What If?). Leave it to the guys who bedazzled many with the near half-billion grossing The Lego Movie, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, to revolutionize the family animated genre once again.
On today’s episode of Crew Call, we talk with the writers and producers of Across the Spider-Verse on one-upping the animated style from their first movie, the Oscar winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; juggling a slew of projects via their production shingle Lord Miller (they produced the winter $87 million-grossing hit Cocaine Bear, and have the second season of The Afterparty on Apple TV+ in July and the Universal R-rated doggie comedy Strays out in August in theaters); their next live-action feature directorial; and their thoughts on what AMPTP needs to do to end this WGA strike.
Says Lord, “The thing to keep in mind which is simple to understand is that writers pay is down 25% and budgets are up and executive compensation is up. It’s not sustainable that way. I think a fair deal is absolutely within reach.”
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse nabbed the best opening of summer to date at $120.6M stateside, the third-best-ever domestic opening for a Spider-Man film, with an overall global start of $209M.
You can listen to our chat below.