GET SMART

With three Spider-Men and six (solo) movies in the 16 years since Sam Raimi’s proof of concept, Spider-Verse risks being the film that broke the arachnid’s back. But Lord and Miller are embracing Spider-Man’s cumbersome cinematic legacy in a fiendishly intelligent way. “I thought, ‘What could be more postmodern than retelling the Spider-Man story yet again, and in the midst of doing that, to uncover infinite retellings of the Spider-Man story?’” says Lord. That’s right, in a move that rivals Lord and Miller sneaking an anti-consumerist message into a movie about Lego, the pair have made a SpiderMan film (in part) about how Hollywood keeps making Spider-Man films. But as with The Lego Movie, the pair aren’t being smarty pants for the sake of it. “What’s interesting about the longevity of SpiderMan,” says Lord, “is that it doesn’t matter how many times you hear that story told, there’s something really fundamental about his struggle that we all relate to.”