Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the guys who made meatballs rain on a colorful town and comically oversized sacks of money fall on Warner Bros. with The Lego Movie, have been tapped to bring their increasingly lucrative brand of whimsy to Sony’s Spider-Man franchise. As revealed by Sony executives at this year’s CinemaCon, the pair will be helming an animated version of everyone’s favorite neighborhood wall-crawler, set for a July 20, 2018 release. There’s no word yet on whether Lord and Miller, whose previous superhero work includes writing the upcoming Flash movie and all the fun Batman bits in The Lego Movie, will have Peter Parker once again under the mask—as in all of the character’s live-action appearances—or whether they’ll do something interesting for a change. It was noted, however, that the animated Spidey will exist separately from his latest live-action incarnation, who’s expected to debut in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and star in his own movie in 2017.
Presumably, at some point during all these developments, someone at Sony wondered out loud whether the movie-going public could handle more than one version of Spider-Man showing up in theaters in such a short period of time. Then they all exchanged glances, burst into laughter, and got back to writing five more versions of Peter Parker’s origin story to get them through the next 20 years.