Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse has taken the Oscar award for Best Animated Feature, unseating Pixar (who was in the running) for the first time. It was my favourite film of last year, and you can catch the first 9 minutes above. Via the Verge:
Back in 2013, Sony Pictures Entertainment announced plans for its own elaborate, interconnected universe based around Spider-Man. Among the planned titles: Amazing Spider-Man 3 (which never happened), Venom (which arguably shouldn’t have happened), and The Sinister Six (which hasn’t happened yet, though writer-director Drew Goddard would still love to tackle it). Instead, Sony went a different way, partnering with Marvel two years later to make Spider-Man part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, leading to Tom Holland’s portrayal of Peter Parker in Spider-Man: Homecoming and other MCU films.
It was a concession that perhaps Marvel Studios knew how to best handle the marquee version of the character. But in spite of Spider-Man’s successful MCU integration, Sony continued to work on many of its expanded universe ideas. The most intriguing of the bunch was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, an animated film meant not only to step away from the world of live-action superheroes, but to put the spotlight on Miles Morales, the character writer Brian Michael Bendis created in 2011 to take over the mantle of Spider-Man after Peter Parker was killed. With the project being creatively shepherded by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the duo behind The Lego Movie and the 21 Jump Street films, the project had the potential to offer a fresh, radically different take on the character that would actually warrant a standalone film in a sea of interconnected franchise titles.