Across The Spider-Verse (Part 1) will be even more visually zany than the first movie

We weirdly now live in a world where it’s commonplace to have movies about Spider-Man—the Marvel hero who became hugely popular partially because of the relatable problems he faced in addition to his costumed antics—focus on ridiculous multiversal shenanigans with alternate realities and unimaginably enormous cosmic stakes, but maybe there are only so many movies you can make about a guy with the proportionate strength of a spider before you start to wonder what would happen if he went through some kind of big portal and met a different version of himself.

But if every Spider-Man movie is going to be about that now, they’re going to have to find ways to differentiate themselves, and Across The Spider-Verse (Part 1) is apparently planning to do that by embracing one of the biggest strengths from its predecessor, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. Speaking with Collider, co-writers Phil Lord and Chris Miller teased that, with the movie involving Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales going to different universes rather than other Spider-People coming to his universe, it opens up a lot of aesthetic possibilities.

“We didn’t want to just sort of do the same thing again,” Chris Miller noted, “And so the idea that we’d be going to different dimensions really opened up an opportunity artistically to have each world have its own art style.” They also said that they’re working with animation studio ImageWorks to “develop a way to have each dimension feel like it was drawn by a different artist’s hand.” You can see a bit of this in the teaser that was released in December, with Miles and Hailee Steinfeld’s Gwen flying through different universes with different art styles. It turns out that’s just not a gimmick for one particular sequence, but for the whole film.

Across The Spider-Verse (Part One) will also feature Oscar Isaac as the futuristic Spider-Man 2099 (a character who has always been very cool and deserves the big spotlight that this movie will provide) and Issa Rae as Jessica Drew, a.k.a. Spider-Woman (a character who is not always as closely related to Spider-Man as her super-name implies, unless we’re talking Ultimate Jessica Drew, whose relationship to Peter Parker is… complicated). Anyway, the movie will be out on October 7.