Into the Spider-Verse’s post-credits scene plays differently now
Remember in 2018, when Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse in cinemas, the face of American animation changed and left us all with a teaser for the future, built around a fandom in-joke? An alternate Spider identity not previously seen in the film – Miguel O’Hara, aka “vampire ninja” Spider-Man 2099 – briefly enters the scene in this post-credits sequence, introducing the idea of voluntary jumps between universes.
With Kingpin defeated and Miles Morales’ initial conflicts resolved, the idea behind that post-credits sequence was to set up the upcoming conflict in a larger multiverse story. But that scene, mostly just an extended gag riff a well-known Spider memeplays incredibly differently after watching In the Spider-Versethe sequel, Spider-Man: About the Spider-Verse.
[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.]
For starters, this scene gives us a simplified villain (or just anti-hero? It remains to be seen) point of origin – the exact moment when Spider-Man 2099 first tested the idea of the wristbands he used to send an elite cadre of Spider-People to the protect reality. For another, it’s a bit more of an introduction to Lyla, Spider-Man 2099’s AI personal assistant, than About the Spider-Verse offers. Here they are more like partners and companions than a man and his Siri.
But the main way this scene looks different now than it did in 2018 is that it’s pretty hilarious, largely because Miguel O’Hara is acting unhappy and goofy towards his first alt-reality doppelgänger. The gritty, extreme-driven leader described in About the Spider-Verse as the only Spider-Man, who isn’t funny, was clearly a lot lighter in demeanor and demeanor before he started hopping between universes.
About the Spider-Verse let him explain how that change happened – what he was trying to do with the multiverse and what the results were. That experience clearly left him much more hardened and bitter than he had seemingly been just a few years before. It’s the kind of radical change that often comes from different people writing the same character, or the same character being written differently after a five-year hiatus. So there are certainly practical reasons for the shift. But in this case there are also narrative reasons, and looking back at what little we knew about him before his multiversal experiences is quite striking. He is driven, dangerous and completely hostile to other people’s perspectives About the Spider-Verse. Here he’s just a joke – a joke that gets a lot darker and sadder after seeing what he became next.
Unfortunately, About the Spider-Verse doesn’t have its own post-credits scene, so there’s no big reveals we can discuss in 2024 when Beyond the Spider-Verse is from.