Home Entertainment It’s official! Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animated Spider-Man movie stars Miles Morales

It’s official! Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animated Spider-Man movie stars Miles Morales

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People are weird. I knew somebody (who I will just straight up call a racist) who had a small conniption when Marvel killed off Peter Parker in 2011 to replace him with a new Spider-Man in the half African-American, half Latino Miles Morales (who got his powers from a different radioactive spider bite). That this was actually in an alternate timeline universe (Marvel’s Ultimate Universe) and the original Peter Parker was still alive and doing what he always did or that Miles Morales was actually a fantastic character and that his subsequent Ultimate Spider-Man book was one of the best things Marvel was putting out at the time, didn’t matter to this person. He just saw a person of colour “replacing” a white guy and raged, raged, raged.

Yes, he was not alone in this raging, but luckily most people were not like him. Miles Morales went on to become immensely popular – so popular that Disney even gave him his own cartoon series, and when the Ultimate Universe was destroyed, Marvel even brought him over to their mainstream “616” universe as well. All of this meant that when it was revealed that Marvel Studios had cut a deal with Sony to finally be able to use Spider-Man in their cinematic universe, there was a massive rally from fans to have Miles Morales be that new Spider-Man.

Honestly though, as much as I love Miles, that was never going to happen. It doesn’t matter how popular Miles is, or that we had already had two aborted series of Spider-Man movies starring Peter Parker. The fact of the matter is that for millions of people around the world Spider-Man will always equal Peter Parker, so Marvel were always going to use the original.

But that doesn’t mean that Miles Morales could not get his own big budget feature film treatment though. It was announced a while back that besides for Marvel’s upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming, super hot filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, Untitled Han Solo Movie) would also be penning/producing an animated Spider-Man feature film for Sony. We haven’t known much about the movie other than some rumours, but now we finally have an official confirmation from Sony: Miles Morales will be the star of the still untitled Spider-Man animated movie.

The news was also echoed at a press conference held by Sony in which they even debuted early footage from the film. Unfortunately, that footage has not been made available online, but i09 describes it as “Miles fighting a purple-and-yellow clad villain”. There was one little bit of bad news though: This Spider-Man movie will indeed be set outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so no interacting with the Avengers we’ve been watching on the big screen for the last few years. Seeing as Miles began his life in an alternate comic book universe, this is not that bad, I guess.

There were no further details given for the movie though, including its voice cast. Donald Glover (who is co-starring in Lord and Miller’s Han Solo’s movie as a young Lando Calrissian) voiced Miles Morales in Disney XD’s Ultimate Spider-Man cartoon series and he actually even has a role in the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming, but there’s no hint given as to whether he will resume his voicing duties for this.

Are you excited to see Miles Morales on swinging around on the big screen when the still untitled Spider-Man movie (what is it with Lord and Miller and not giving their movies names?) releases on 21 December 2018?

 

Last Updated: January 19, 2017

One Comment

  1. Kromas Ryder

    January 19, 2017 at 10:36

    I like Miles. He is a really good spiderman. The only time I have issues with remade superheroes is when they change named characters like Peter Parker to match a new ethnicity. Hell I am even excited for the new Iron man chick.

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