Miles Morales Is Coming Back To The Spider-Verse Sooner Than Expected
Miles Morales stars in The Spider Within, a short film focusing on mental health, encouraging people to get help if they need it.
Miles Morales, aka the best Spider-Man, swung his way into our stylistically-animated hearts when Sony Pictures Imageworks released Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse back in 2018. Those of us wanting to revisit the well-loved replacement of Peter Parker thought we’d have to wait for the sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, to release in June 2023. However, Variety reports that we’ll get an earlier taste of Morales in an upcoming short film titled The Spider Within.
The short, which will release at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, follows Miles Morales after the events of Into the Spider-Verse, which had Morales take up the mantle of Spider-Man after Peter Parker, his universe’s anyways, got himself killed. The short will touch on a theme that’s pretty common across Spider-Man media: having to deal with the stresses of everyday life while also being a superhero.
However, instead of taking the regular route of most Spider-Man stories and focusing on the drama surrounding how Peter Parker must do things alone, it seems that The Spider Within will take the revolutionary step of actually promoting healthy life choices. In the film, Miles Morales shows just how different his character is from his non-Spider-Verse predecessors by learning that it’s brave to reach out for help when you need it. If Tobey Maguire‘s Spider-Man learned that lesson, he might not have ended up dressing in black and dancing down the street.
Of course, Miles Morales and the rest of the Spider-Verse crew are nothing if not unconventional. The original film had Morales team up with differing (and often odd) versions of the Spider-Man character from across multiple universes — ranging from a cartoonish pig voiced by John Mulaney to a film noir detective version of the character voiced by Nicholas Cage. The film also featured Ghost-Spider, a version of Spider-Man whose secret identity is the usually-dead Gwen Stacey, coming from a universe where she was bitten by a radioactive spider rather than Peter Parker.
In the original film, Miles Morales and the rest of the Spider-Verse team had to stop Kingpin from destroying the world as he attempted to find an alternate-universe version of his dead wife, Vanessa Fisk. His multiversal meddling resulted in heroes and villains from separate universes appearing in Morales’ reality.
However, Miles Morales won’t have the luxury of staying in his own reality when Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse comes out. In the new film, Morales and Gwen Stacey travel across multiple universes to take on a foe that threatens all the spider-folk in the multiverse. Unfortunately for Miles, he ends up going up against these spider-people (and/or spider-pigs) thanks to a disagreement on how to best handle this existential threat.
The exact details of who Miles Morales is up against (beyond The Spot, likely not the big bad of the film) and why he decides that an entire Spider-Verse full of spider-themed superheroes is wrong has not yet been revealed. We’ll have to wait until June 2, 2023, when Across the Spider-Verse is set to release in theaters.
