Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Was Reportedly Plagued with Extreme Animator Overwork

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is one of the most beautiful and creative animated movies ever made — so you may not be happy to hear that Vulture is reporting that working conditions on the movie were particularly arduous, and writer-producer Phil Lord reportedly demanded significant changes to finished or nearly finished animation on a regular basis. Per four crew member speaking anonymously, Lord took so long to make important decisions during the movie’s layout stage that it required the crew to work 11-hour days, seven days a week, for more than a year to get the movie done on time.

Co-directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers were reportedly “overshadowed” by Phil Lord, who “sought final approval for every sequence in the film,” while co-writer/producer Chris Miller was apparently “MIA for much of the production.” Sony executives deny this accounting of events, with Michelle Grady, the executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks, basically saying that workers just perceived Lord as a convenient target for their distress.

Reportedly around 100 artists departed Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse before production had completed, but former Sony Pictures Entertainment chairperson Amy Pascal countered that this is a normal number considering that “over a thousand” people worked on the movie. She also reiterated that animation is an iterative process and that you have to just keep going until it’s right. But about the grueling number of reworks demanded, including workers having to revise final renders five times in a row, Pascal had something rather callous to say: “I guess, (‘)Welcome to making a movie.(‘)”

The four workers speaking anonymously about the arduous development process of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse were given the opportunity to present first-hand accounts under pseudonyms. One worker, “Steven,” claimed, “The thing is, Phil and Chris are incapable of committing to an idea. They don’t really have a clear vision. What they’re good at is slowly and incrementally making things better through trial and error.” Although, he acknowledged that Lord and Miller certainly know animation — they directed The Lego Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs — and he is in fact still a fan of their work. They’re just allegedly bad at managing a production under budget and without asking extraordinary labor of animators. In fact, one reason animators reportedly chose to stick around is that the odds were extremely good that their work would be thrown out during a future rewrite, meaning all their labor would never be seen.

So, the tl;dr here, if these anecdotes accurately reflect the larger picture of the production, is that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was a grueling death march for its animators as Phil Lord regularly altered entire scenes of the movie. And the animators insist that there is no way the final movie, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, will land in its current March 2024 release date because very little work has been done on it yet. All of this really puts a damper on what has otherwise been an extremely successful movie in Across the Spider-Verse, both commercially and critically.