Like any good film, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse leaves us wanting more of the adventures of Spider-Man Miles Morales. Given that box office for the film has been pretty good, it seems likely that we will get a sequel. But that could still be a couple of years away. So what to do in the meantime? Well, there may be a bit more of the current film available to see than what has reached theaters.
Speaking with Collider, Into The Spider-Verse co-director Bob Persichetti revealed that there are approximately ten minutes of finished footage that wound up being cut from the film.
[A] rare thing for an animated film is that there’s animation on the cutting room floor. There’s a bout ten minutes of that from this movie, which is a really high number. And there’s one scene specifically that was one we all really loved, but the movie just kept pushing it out. It was like a splinter, and your body’s like “Nope, you’re not gonna fit there. Get Out.”
What makes this extraordinary is that rarely are animated sequences fully realized but then cut from the final film. Animation can be an expensive and time consuming process. In order to conserve money and man hours, an animated film’s structure is carefully crafted first in static storyboards and then in simple animatics. If some story element is not working at either of those two stages, than it is cut right then rather than wasting all the effort to fully realize the animation only for it to go unseen. Persichetti himself notes that the films initial, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink animatic assembly ran nearly three hours. But that contained every story idea that had been developed for the film and as we can tell with the final product’s runtime of just under two hours, nearly a third of that original material was shorn off along the way through production.
When an animated film’s DVD/blu-ray release features deleted scenes, it is almost always rough, unfinished footage that development on stopped at some point. The footage is almost always either storyboards, animatics or even not fully rendered animation.
Persichetti does state whether this footage will make it on to any home video release. I would think, however, if they were looking to do a fairly decent package – and I have a feeling that they want to show off the new animation techniques that they developed for the film – than there is a good chance that some of this unseen material could make it onto DVD and blu-ray.
