After nearly a month in theaters, “Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse” looks like an early frontrunner for 2023’s movie of the summer. And while the film faces off against “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny” next weekend, Sony‘s animated film is off to a great start at the box office. The sequel to 2018’s “Into The Spider-Verse” currently sits at $506.7 million globally off a $100 million budget. That means Sony’s confident about their planned March 2024 release for the trilogy-closing “Beyond The Spider-Verse,” right?
Maybe Sony execs are, but the animators who worked on “Across The Spider-Verse” certainly aren’t. Vulture reports that multiple animators spoke to the publication about the unsustainable working conditions crew members had to deal with to hit the film’s June 2 release date. And the charges against the “Spider-Verse” producers are dire: seven-day work weeks; eleven-hour days; and the erratic management style of producer Phil Lord in particular, whose preference to want to edit fully-rendered work causes animators to redo work they already finished several times. If they work culture continues, artists say, there’s no way “Beyond The Spider-Verse” get its currently planned theatrical release.
According to Vulture, Lord’s penchant for revisionism caused up to 100 artists hired to work on “Across The Spider-Verse” to leave the film before its completion. Their main source of frustration? Lord consistently went over the heads of directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thom, and Kemp Powers to have departments alter and re-edit animated sequences the three had already approved. Lord’s constant tinkering with the movie in layout stage also allegedly caused lengthy production delays, with animators hired to work on the film not working for between three and six months in 2022. Sony initially had “Across The Spider-Verse” planned for an April 2022 release before the studio postponed it to October before shifting it again to its June 2, 2023 theatrical release.
Vulture talked to four animators who worked and ultimately left the hit film to discuss the arduous production schedule and Lord’s overbearing attitude on it. According to Stephen, “With Phil Lord, nothing is ever final or approved. Nothing was really set in stone. Nothing was ever done. Everything was just endlessly moving beneath our feet because they wanted it to be the best that it could be.” Charlie agreed with “Phil being all over the place and not settling on the story,” and said, “It’s his reputation. I know a ton of people who never want to work on a project with him again.” Charlie also said that Phil’s position as a producer gave him an absurd amount of leverage. “Of course, it’s part of every movie where the director says, ‘What if we could do this or that?’ And normally, it’s the producer’s role to push back. The problem is, Phil is the producer. He can’t push back against himself.”
Charlie posited that Lord simply can’t visualize 3-D storyboards and envision the story he’s tasked to help create. “He has a big issue with not being able to visualize layouts,” Charlie continued. “When there’s a 3-D layout in front of him, I guess he can’t visualize what it’s going to look like afterward. Which is kind of a problem when you’re working in 3-D animation.” Another VFX artist Vulture talked to, Nathan, likened Lord’s creative process to erecting a skyscraper without blueprints. “The analogy for the way Phil works, it’s getting a whole bunch of construction workers to make a building without a blueprint. You get them to start putting bricks on top of each other. You get the wood guys to put the wood in, put the windows in, get some metal scaffold in there. And he’s like, “Nah, knock that part down.”
Eliott, the fourth artist who talked with Vulture, said productions Lord and Miller worked have this reputation in the animation industry. “I was warned,” he said. “It was like [other workers] were amping themselves up to run a marathon.” Nathan also confirmed that other animators notified him about previous projects they worked on under Lord and his producing partner, Chris Miller, like the first “Spider-Verse” film and “The Lego Movie.” “Phil and Chris have a reputation,” he confirmed. “As producers, they used to come onto a project when it was 80 percent finished. Once they could ingest the movie properly and see what it is going to be like, they would come through with the guillotine and start enthusiastically editing. They’d come in and start to rewrite lines, throw out entire sequences, throw out animations all over the place, everywhere. And this is animation that people have been working on for a long time.”
Nathan described working conditions for animators on “Across The Spider-Verse” as “extremely vulnerable.” Eliott echoed those claims, citing that animators who moved to Vancouver, Canada to work on the film at Sony Pictures Animation found themselves sitting idly in the apartments they rented waiting to work. Financial security for works became an issue, too, especially for foreign workers who took a job on the film in hopes of emigrating. Eliott claims some animators were underpaid, dependent on overtime pay because Sony’s relocation package couldn’t cover their cost of living. “That’s no way to live your life,” he said.
While Vulture reached to Lord, Miller, Dos Santos, Thompson, and Powers through the studio to comment on their story, they all declined. However, Sony Pictures Entertainment head Amy Pascal, who’s behind Sony’s three recent live-action “Spider-Man” films and the two “Spider-Verse” ones, admitted to major overhauls on “Across The Spider-Verse.” Pascal claims “over a thousand” VFX artists worked on the successful sequel, so it comes with little surprise than a tenth of them would eventually leave such a long production. Executive Vice-President and GM at Sony Pictures Imageworks Michelle Grady echoed Pascal’s sentiment about workers leaving challenging productions, especially those that get revised. “It really does happen on every film,” she said “Truly, honestly, it can be a little bit frustrating, but we always try to explain that this is the process.”
Grady also said Lord isn’t to blame for the film’s delays, but it only looks that way because he’s tasked with informing the editorial changes coming not just from him, but directors, executive producers, and the studio. Pascal also alluded to the collective creative process of producers on a film production. “One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right,” she said. “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.” As for animators frustrated with constantly revising their renderings on the film, Pascal said, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.”
The demoralizing working conditions on “Across The Spider-Verse” is the latest in a series of stories of Hollywood studios overworking VFX animators. Last summer, an anonymous Reddit thread started by a VFX artist accused Marvel Studios of normalizing exhausting working conditions for VFX houses. That thread prompted another article by Vulture, who cited Marvel demanding unreasonable and constantly shifting deadlines, prioritizing some projects over others, and unsustainable working hours, leading to delays. And similar stories emerged last year about DC productions like “Black Adam.” Now it looks like the same taskmaster-like tactics plague the beloved “Spider-Verse” series. So what will incite the culture change here that desperately needs to happen? Because the well-being or works matters more than if “Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse” arrives to audiences on time.
