The Spider Within Debuts, See New Spider-Verse Film Right Now
It has finally dropped. The Spider Within, the much anticipated Spider-Verse short, has just been released on YouTube, and we’re here for it. For fans of the Spider-Verse films, nothing is more disappointing than hearing that the sequel to a film you loved (that left you on a cliffhanger!) has been pushed back. Yet, here we are. Fortunately, we’ve got a cool 6-minute short to entertain us in the meantime.
The Spider Within was produced by Sony alongside the Kevin Love Foundation to raise awareness for mental health.
We first fell in love with Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Up to this point, fans of Spider-Man films had only seen Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland, all white kids from Queens, play Spider-Man. Now, we have a mixed-race kid from Brooklyn coming through with an amazing supporting cast, including loving parents and a funny mentor.
The Spider Within is leaps and bounds ahead of that first film, dropping us right into the heart of Miles’s life. So let’s catch up a bit. We met Miles, a super smart 15-year-old kid from Brooklyn who attends a fancy private school he got into on a scholarship. His dad is an African-American New York City police captain, and his mother is a Puerto Rican nurse.
So we get this rich cultural film with a diverse cast that also comes with an amazing soundtrack! “Sunflower” by Post Malone, “What’s Up Danger” by Blackway, “Familia” by Nicki Minaj… the list goes on. Working with themes echoed later in The Spider Within, Miles deals with his confidence, self-doubt, and extreme anxiety at learning from his delightful multi-dimensional mentor, Peter B. Parker, that “with great power comes great responsibility.”
The second film, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, then, has Miles confronting the fact that he is a “glitch” in the system. That radioactive spider was never supposed to be in his universe, and he was never meant to be Spider-Man. (Mind. Blown.) After two and a half hours of meeting many, many, many Spider-Mans from all the other possible universes, Miles makes a desperate bid to return home to his earth, Earth 1612.
The Spider Within is leaps and bounds ahead of that first film, dropping us right into the heart of Miles’s life.
Unfortunately, he arrives on Earth-42, where his Uncle Aaron, who died in his own universe, is still alive, and the Miles of this Earth takes him captive. So there we all were, in the theaters, credits rolling, asking ourselves and the big screen in front of us, “Whaaaaaaat?”
The Spider Within does not answer our question in the slightest. Instead, we get a glimpse into Miles’ mental state as a teenager with a lot on his mind and powers he’s still figuring out how to control. This makes sense once you know this is a stand-alone short produced by Sony with the Kevin Love Foundation to help raise funds for mental health.
The Spider Within is all the Spider-Verse we get in 2024.
Still, it’s nice to see the writers and directors are hard at work. The third and final movie in the trilogy, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, was supposed to be released in cinemas on March 29, 2024, but it has been pushed back to who-knows-when. We’re hoping for late 2024, but the last film got pushed back almost two full years, so it’s anyone’s guess.
Still, while we may not get the answers we’re looking for, we can get a little taste of Miles and his dad on YouTube in The Spider Within, and support the crew working on the upcoming film.
