Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s’ Journey From Video Game to Oscars

Dan Slott wants to make one thing very clear: “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse” — animated tour-de-force, Oscar winner, the best Spidey movie ever made — is its own thing.“It tells the story of Miles,” Slott says. “The heart of the movie is that.”But, that said, tracing back the deep roots of the movie, past its direct inspiration, to what one could call the inspiration of its inspiration and you find a surprising thing: A 2010 video game created by a Canadian studio for game industry powerhouse Activision.That revelation came to light on the eve of this year’s Oscars when established Marvel Comics writer Slott took to Twitter to call out the game, and the many other things that lead to the birth of the “Spiderverse.”But, Slott says again in a recent conversation with Variety, it’s sort of a weird bridge to build to directly connect that game to this movie. Rather it was the notion of the Spiderverse that the game really gave life to. “Spider-Man Shattered Dimensions”Thomas Wilson, co-studio head of developer Beenox, was the creative director on the game when Activision came to the studio and asked for it to create a new sort of Spidey experience. Originally, we were cast with the idea of coming up with a different Spider-Man game,” Wilson told Variety in a recent interview. “They wanted us to shake things up, to come up with something unique and exciting.”So the team set about looking through the deep history and lore of Spider-Man and his many incarnations.