The following contains SPOILERS for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse!
The Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ending left fans with one hell of a cliffhanger earlier this year. While the original plan to actually call the movie Part One was changed, the story really is only half of the complete adventure, as Miles Morales has been left in a pretty dicey situation, one that, as it turns out, wasn’t originally the plan.
If you somehow haven’t seen Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse yet, and it’s on Netflix right now, so I don’t know what your excuse is, then you know that Miles has found himself in a dimension not his own, but rather the one that created the spider that bit him. In other words, it’s a world without a Spider-Man.
As a result, we learn that the Miles Morales of that world became the Prowler. Co-director Kemp Powers recently revealed to GamesRadar that the initial plan was to make Miles’ uncle Aaron The Prowler, just as he had been in Into the Spider-Verse, but then Powers had the idea to change things, apparently in the middle of an unrelated meeting. The filmmaker explained…
So, Aaron was still The Prowler and this is rather far along into development too. I remember we had a meeting over Zoom and something just came to me – that Miles should be The Prowler. I felt bad as someone was presenting, but I texted the guys and we were all so excited. There was already a design for that Miles, but we sent our wonderful designer back to the drawing board, asking him to redesign the character as The Prowler.
Miles still would have become a villain rather than a hero. He was originally going to be a sidekick to his uncle, but then Powers had the idea to swap the roles. The decision to make the character The Prowler truly flips the universe on its head compared to the character we know.
Miles’ uncle is a major presence in Across the Spider-verse, even though the character died in the previous film. It seems those references were also added later, as a way to foreshadow where things were going. Powers continued…
It’s like a Pottersville or It’s A Wonderful Life kind of moment. It was always thematically the same – if Miles never got powers, what would become of him – but the original wasn’t as impactful. We had Miles as Aaron’s sidekick, his Robin, but him becoming The Prowler evoked a whole different emotion. When we screened the original, people wouldn’t get it, they just saw another Miles with cornrows and wondered what the deal is. But with that Prowler twist, that made people go, ‘Woah,’ as it’s symbolic of so much. And after that, we threaded in all the references to The Prowler throughout the movie.
Of course, with that major twist comes millions of fans dying to know what happens next. It will likely be a while before we learn that. Originally planned to be released just a year after Across the Spider-Verse as the third film in the trilogy, the Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-verse official release date is currently unknown. If the final film is as good as the first two, it will be worth the wait.