The first trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part 1) dropped this weekend, reuniting us with Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy for the first time since 2018's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse brought us on an Oscar-winning thrill-ride. You might be wondering about the character Miles is battling in the futuristic city, but we already glimpsed him in the previous movie's post-credits scene.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part 1) is scheduled to hit theaters in October 2022. Part 2 will come out in 2023, writer-producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller told EW on Saturday.
Time to party like it's 2099 and swing some into three-year-old SPOILERS.
A trip to the future... and the past
After Miles, Gwen and their fellow Spider-People stop Kingpin's city-endangering plot to travel to parallel universes and everyone goes home, we meet another pair of Spider-Men, one from the distant future and another from more than 50 years ago, before they end up in an intense (and meme-worthy) bout of literal pointing.
The first of these is Miguel O'Hara, better known as Spider-Man 2099 (Oscar Isaac), who's been monitoring the action with his holographic assistant Lyla (Greta Lee) and sees that everyone has returned to their own realities. With the multiverse saved, Miguel decides to go on his own reality-hopping adventure.
"Let's start at the beginning."
Miguel travels to Earth-67, the reality of the 1967 Spider-Man animated series. That's the one with the glorious theme song and the first animated Spidey. Thus "the beginning" here.
Spider-Man 2099 has been around since 1992.
Marvel ComicsHe encounters the Spider-Man of this universe, and the pair end up arguing over who pointed first -- a moment based on the famous pointing meme that's been around since 2011. We even get a cameo from Earth-67's J. Jonah Jameson.
What it means
Spider-Man 2099 was created by Peter David and Rick Leonardi, and made his debut in 1992's Spider-Man 2099 No. 1. Miguel is a gifted geneticist living in New York (renamed Nueva York) in 2099, an era when a dystopian US is run by evil megacorporations like Alchemax, a company that plays a big role in the Spider-Verse.
While trying to replicate the abilities of original Spidey Peter Parker for Alchemax, Miguel is forced by his unethical boss, Tyler Stone, to take an addictive drug. In an effort to shake the addiction, Miguel accidentally splices his DNA with that of a spider and gains a similar set of abilities as the original Spider-Man.
He's also the first Latino character to become Spider-Man. His costume is available in Spider-Man PS4, and he was a playable character in 2010's Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions and its 2011 sequel, Edge of Time.
In the post-credits scene, Miguel travels to Double Identity, a Season 1 episode of the 1967 animated series. It focuses on an actor impersonating others to throw off police as he commits crimes. The pointing scene is from a moment when he pretends to be Spider-Man, and it inspired one of the many memes based on the show.
Spider-Man 2099 and Spider-Man '67 engage in some intense pointing.
Sony PicturesIt's not clear why Miguel is traveling through the multiverse, but the trailer for Across the Spider-Verse suggests that Miles will end up in 2099 at some point.
Also, the spider that gave Miles Morales his powers suffered from the same temporal distortion as Peter and the other heroes who'd been pulled from other realities. Since the spider had an Alchemax logo, could it have come from Miguel's reality? The company exists in Miles' universe as well, so it might also have been branded after it arrived there.
