Alt-Universe Cut of ‘Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse’ Coming [at Some Point]

Following their Oscar win for Best Animated Feature, the directors behind Sony’s Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse are teasing the upcoming home release of the groundbreaking film.

During a press day to celebrate the film at Warner Bros. Pictures, CinemaBlend got to speak with directors Rodney Rothman, Bob Persichetti, and Peter Ramsey about the upcoming home release, including a Spider-Ham short that’ll be added into the beginning of the film.

Rothman explained a bit about what fans can expect to see in the yet-to-be-confirmed Alt-Universe cut of Spider-Verse:

[Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse] had an unusual amount of material at every stage of production. So, an insane amount of storyboard material, like insane, like break your high end edit systems insane. An insane amount of layout, an insane amount of finished animation that didn’t make it into the movie… an unusual amount. So the Alt-Universe Cut contains a bunch of that stuff that we chose not to put in the movie, but that in an alternate universe easily could have ended up in the movie. So, uh, that’s kind of the premise behind it.

One of the cool things about this movie, and especially since it’s been released, is that we do actually like to share a lot about the process of making it, and the different iterations we went through because so many people worked for so long in this movie, and we did really try a lot of different things. So that version of the movie is like a great window into how the movie evolved, and different things that we were working on. And for any filmmakers out there, anyone interested in our movie or movies generally it will be interesting. I know I love that stuff when I see it.

Apparently, there was a whole other character cut out of the resulting feature film, and fans will be able to see Miles Morales with his new roommate, Ganke Lee.

Persichetti commented:

The alt version is more beholden to the idea that Miles and Ganke were buddies and roommates, and there’s a lot more of roommate stuff happening. And what we ended up running into was just to two things. It was just like, ‘Oh, wow. Homecoming, Ned – very similar to Ganke.’ Really. And then, ‘Well, maybe it’s actually better if Miles experiences these things without a really well-educated Sherpa holding his hand through all the powers coming on and everything,’ and it ended up helping us out for that place where Peter comes into the movie.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse just released on Digital today, and will release via physical media (4K, Blu-ray, and DVD) on March 19th.