Four minutes of footage from next year’s Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse have leaked online, and have done so in pretty fine quality. The footage contains a lengthy scene from what we must assume is the opening of the movie, followed by a trailer-like montage, and ending with the movie’s June 18, 2027 release date. The whole thing looks like a package that would be shown at a convention—in this case most likely CinemaCon—and Sony is now frantically trying to have it removed from the internet. But given how good it all is, it’d make a lot more sense for the company to just push out an official upload.
2023’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse rather notoriously ended on a cliffhanger. Which is a more polite way of saying the reality: it just stopped. It was kinda infuriating. That there was then to be a four-year wait before the movie we were in the middle of watching carried on made it feel all the more odd of a choice. But now, with less than a year to go, it’s probably about time Sony started building some hype, while also reminding us where things had left off. Except, this appears to be happening against its will.
Spider-Versus
If you’ve forgotten how the previous movie ended as much as I had, it was like this (spoilers for Across the Spider-Verse, obviously): Miles Morales, desperate to save his father, escapes the multiverse-protecting Spider Society and tries to use its portal machine to return to his home, Earth-1610. Instead, he gets sent to Earth-42, a grimdark reality that has no Spider-Man, and where alternate Miles Morales has become the Prowler. This world’s Uncle Aaron, working with his nephew, captures our Miles, leaving Gwen Stacy to team up with the movie’s main Spider-Men to launch a rescue mission. To be continued.
This new clip picks up immediately from the “end” of the last film, with alt-Aaron and Prowler-Miles arguing with our hero in a scene primarily made of bants and the expected stunning art. This is then followed by a collection of fairly generic (but still so gorgeously animated) context-free fight scenes, a couple of quieter moments, and then the familiar team of Spider-Men gathering to rescue their buddy. There are no spoilers here, no surprises or revelations, but an awful lot of reminders of why this franchise is so utterly adored and hugely respected. It’s got me hyped to see the movie.
Stuck on the web
We’ve not embedded a clip here, not because we’re trying to protect it or you, but because they’re getting deleted as fast as they’re getting uploaded, even on X. But if you want to see it, you can easily find it.
Early leaks can be pretty unhelpful for some movies, not least when they’re a badly-framed phone capture of a laptop screen while people shout in the background. (That’s not an exaggeration, but the ridiculous way in which we first encountered Spider-Man: Brand New Day.) You can understand why movie studios would want that sort of janky footage removed. But the Beyond the Spider-Verse leak appears to be the original video in HD, and with the cat this far out of the bag it seems folly to try to round it back up. Yet that’s Sony’s current plan, sniping the incessant uploads as they appear. And that seems a shame, given the clip can only do the movie good at this point. Just put it on YouTube, Sony! Your PR plan already got broken. This is the best advertising you could hope for.
