Sony Debuts ‘Across the Spider-Verse’ Footage at CinemaCon, Announces ‘El Muerto’ Starring Bad Bunny, and More

Spider-Verse

The 2022 edition of CinemaCon kicked off Monday with Sony Pictures’ presentation, in which the company discussed its upcoming slate, including some of its Spider-Verse slate of movies, both animated and live-action, a new Ghostbusters movie, and more.

 

Starting with their Spider-Man slate, the studio announced that Part 2 of the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse sequels will be titled Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, something that will get confusing pretty quick. The studio announced recently that it will come out on March 29, 2024. They also showed the first 15 minutes of Part 1, titled Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Here’s The Wrap‘s description of the footage:

 

“Producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller introduced the first 15 minutes, much of which was presented in storyboard and in-progress animation footage. The film starts in Gwen Stacy’s universe, Earth-65, where Gwen is having an awkward conversation with her police officer father, who is hunting down Spider-Woman, unaware that his target is his own daughter.

But when the villainous Vulture breaks out and attacks New York, Gwen swings into action, knowing that the police will be waiting for her. After subduing her father, Gwen takes on the Vulture, who is presented in a sepia palette and comes from another universe.

But before Vulture can deal a finishing blow to Gwen, she is rescued by Miguel O’Hara, a.k.a. Spider-Man 2099, who was teased in the post-credit scene for the first “Spider-Verse” movie. While they fight Vulture together, he reveals that the first film’s climactic battle with Kingpin ripped open tears in the multiverse, allowing all sorts of villains to wreak havoc.

Fortunately, the tears also allowed for help from other Spiders, including a pregnant Jessica Drew, a.k.a. Spider-Woman of Earth-404, who helps the other two webslingers bring down the Vulture.

But that’s not the end of Gwen’s problems, as her father corners her and holds her at gunpoint, accusing her of killing her universe’s Peter Parker. With no other choice, Gwen is forced to unmask and pleads for him to listen to her in a darkly colored scene. Heartbroken, Gwen’s father moves forward with the arrest, but the other two Spiders come in and subdue him, leaving a tearful Gwen with a multiverse jumper to make her escape.

The film then transitions to Miles Morales’ Brooklyn, where our hero is running late for a meeting with his parents and college counselor. Miles wants to apply to Columbia University’s physics program to work on a project that could allow for multiverse jumping — possibly to find a way to see Gwen again. Unfortunately, he’s having a hard time keeping his superhero secret from his parents…and they’re beginning to get suspicious.”

 

Apparently, Lord and Miller, who are producing and co-writing the movie alongside David Callaham, also said that the movie will visit six different Spider-Verses and feature 240 characters, plus more than 1,000 animators are working on it at the moment. It will be released in the summer of 2023. Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers are directing.

 

 

And speaking of Spider-Man-related characters, Sony Pictures has also announced that the singer known as Bad Bunny will be starring in his own Marvel movie for Sony as El Muerto, who appeared in only two issues of Spider-Man comics. Deadline is reporting the movie came to be after Bad Bunny insisted on finding the “right superhero property for himself.” He apparently scoured the Spider-Man pantheon of characters looking for Latin characters that called to him, eventually landing on El Muerto.

 

He is a super-powered wrestler who originally fought and nearly unmasked Spider-Man in a charity wrestling match, right before Spider-Man stung him with a paralyzing poison. After his oppressor, El Dorado, came to claim his life, El Muerto was saved by the webslinger, and the two then teamed up to defeat Dorado. The movie is scheduled for an exclusive theatrical release on January 12, 2024, which could mean that Sony is doubling down on January dates for their Marvel characters. Kraven the Hunter is also scheduled to hit theaters in January of next year.

 

Bad Bunny will make his feature film debut this summer in the David Leitch-directed, Brad Pitt starrer Bullet Train, which dropped its first trailer earlier this year and also debuted its first 15 minutes at CinemaCon. Here is a brief description of the footage:

 

 

Sony chief Tom Rothman introduced a quick reel of the studio’s upcoming slate of movies, during which they announced that Venom 3 and a sequel to Ghostbusters: Afterlife are in the works. The reel also included previously-announced projects like the Whitney Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the Aaron Taylor-Johnson Marvel movie Kraven the Hunter, The Equalizer 3, and Tom Hanks’ A Man Called Otto. In fact, this happened just a few hours after the first official poster for the Whitney Houston biopic, starring The Rise of Skywalker‘s Naomi Ackie, was released:

 

Sony showed footage of I Wanna Dance With Somebody at CinemaCon

 

No mention was made of a fourth live-action Spider-Man movie starring Tom Holland, despite Sony and Marvel hinting at it shortly after No Way Home was released. A sequel to Uncharted, also starring Holland and now close to a $400 million worldwide haul, wasn’t discussed either.

 

As an important footnote unrelated to Sony Picture’s slate, Nintendo and Illumination have announced they are pushing back a few months the upcoming Super Mario Bros. animated movie, starring Chris Pratt as the voice of Mario. It will now be released on April 7 in North America and April 28th, 2023, in Japan. Universal has already taken its former Christmas slot for the upcoming Puss in Boots sequel.

 

 

Stay tuned for more news on CinemaCon. The Warner Bros. panel will be happening on Tuesday, and the Disney panel, where Avatar 2 footage is set to drop, will take place on Wednesday. Universal is also taking the stage on Wednesday, with a new look at Jurassic World: Dominion totally happening. Moreover, Lionsgate is expected to discuss the fourth John Wick and The Expendables (plus their Borderlands adaptation) on Thursday, the same day Paramount is screening Top Gun: Maverick and showing off its franchise-heavy slate. It’s going to be a packed week.