Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. 2023. Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

Film

No upcoming events

Held on Fri, Jan 5, 2024, 7:00 p.m.

MoMA, Floor T1, Theater 1

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. 2023. USA. Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson. Courtesy Sony Pictures

For members at the Explore category and above, tickets will become available two weeks before the screening date, starting at 10:30 a.m. Additional tickets will be available to members and the general public one week before the screening date, also at 10:30 a.m. Please note that space is extremely limited and tickets will be in high demand.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. 2023. USA
. Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson. Screenplay by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham. DCP. Courtesy Sony Pictures. 140 min.

Said to be the longest animated feature ever produced by an American studio, Across the Spider-Verse aims to go beyond what its comic book sources and other live-action superhero films could achieve. Employing as many as 177 animators, this sequel to the Oscar-winning Into the Spider-Verse (2018) is as delirious and demanding as any 2023 release. Its postmodern mashup of animation techniques, CGI, and virtual-reality aesthetics samples aggressively from comic book illustration, graphic design, and fine art history, from Leonardo da Vinci and Egon Schiele to Jeff Koons. In a succession of spectacular, visually distinctive setpieces, the film’s multiplying cast of characters inhabits rapidly transitioning parallel dimensions and “shared multiverses” spanning from India to a futuristic New York City, a punky New London, and a Lego universe, to name only a few. Young Brooklynite Miles Morales, who replaced the original Spider-Man in the first film, struggles to maintain a normal teenage life and hide his secret identity from his loving parents. After he reconnects with his trans-dimensional friend Gwen Stacy (aka Ghost-Spider) during a destructive battle with supernatural forces at the Guggenheim Museum, the pair confront the villainous “Spot” across time and space, engaging teams of combative Spider-People for support. With friendship and family as their core values, the young, multicultural protagonists of Across the Spider-Verse find themselves living in unstable worlds that threaten one apocalypse after another.

This film accompanies The Contenders 2023.

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].