And that really speaks to the amount of problem solving that we had to go through to make sure that that character who’s supposed to represent a very specific part of the world felt authentic to people from that part of the world.” You have to be open in this process to criticism and to good ideas from wherever they come. “It really spoke to the spirit of collaboration on this movie. “Of the new characters that are in the film, I think Pav is one that, collectively, we’re the most proud of,” Powers says, as Dos Santos and Thompson nod in agreement in separate Zoom windows.

And then Chris and Phil very quickly rewrote the entire script for that section so that Pav’s characterization completely changed.” Pavitr became joyous and unshakably optimistic, a character whose natural talent and charisma after mere months as a Spider-Man further exacerbates Miles’ anxiety about his own Spider-abilities. “We literally re-broke the entire sequence and reimagined the Pav character. “We very quickly assembled a writers room of Indian and Indian American writers,” Powers says, which included Soni (“Deadpool”) and comedian Hasan Minhaj. “He doesn’t feel aspirational.”Įven though the sequence was, Powers says, “already quite far along in the production process,” the filmmaking team halted work on it. Then the directors got an email from some Indian members of the animation team based at Sony Pictures Imageworks in Vancouver, who told them that Pavitr, the emotional anchor of the sequence, “doesn’t feel authentic,” as Powers recalls. “‘It gets really crazy here - but we’re not connected to the story.’” “It was like, ‘Why is this just a wet blanket right now?’” Dos Santos recalls.

But as the directors watched the semi-finished sequence unfold with producers and screenwriters Christopher Miller and Phil Lord (who wrote the script with David Callaham), something wasn’t quite working. “We had worked on that sequence for a while, and we finally got it to a place where logically and from a staging perspective, it was doing all the things,” says Joaquim Dos Santos, who directed “Across the Spider-Verse” along with Kemp Powers and Justin K. The sequence launches them all through the vertiginously vertical metropolis, as they frantically try to stop the film’s villain, the Spot (Jason Schwartzman), from using Mumbattan’s supercollider to increase his dimension-hopping abilities. Within minutes, Miles and his BFF from 2018’s “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), encounter that world’s Spider-Man, Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni), an Indian teenager who received his powers not via spider bite, but through magic. Mumbattan, a dazzling amalgamation of New York City and Mumbai.

the Spider-Man of Earth-1610 - enters a different dimension: Earth-50101, a.k.a. For the first time in his life, the animated film’s hero - Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a.k.a. SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot developments and surprises throughout “ Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” now playing in theaters.įor months, the directors of “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” had been working exhaustively on a critical sequence that launches the movie’s second act.

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