Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: Several Animators Claim They Worked Under Unsustainable Conditions

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse may have set a new bar for animation, but it comes at a cost.

In a new report from Vulture, four animators who left the project described particularly difficult working conditions on the project, with numerous revisions as well as 11-hour days, seven days a week.

These issues, it’s claimed, stem from writer/producer Phil Lord’s management style (Vulture reports that, through Sony, Lord, co-writer/producer Chris Miller, and directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Kemp Powers declined to comment).

“As producer, Phil overrides all the directors,” said one animator. “They are obviously in charge of directing, but if Phil has a note that contradicts their note, his note takes precedence. They have to do what Phil says. So, there were constant changes and cuts. With Phil Lord, nothing is ever final or approved. Nothing was really set in stone. Nothing was ever done. Everything was just endlessly moving beneath our feet because they wanted it to be the best that it could be.”

According the animators, Dos Santos, Thompson, and Powers were “overshadowed” by Lord who sought final approval on every sequence in the movie.

His longtime partner Miller was said to be absent for much of the production.

Lord and Miller are renowned in the world of animation for their box office hits, including Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie.

However, when it comes to the Spider-Verse at least, Lord is reported to have struggled to conceptualize 3D sequences during the early planning stages, preferring to edit fully rendered work instead.

Obviously, this leads to a lot more work for the animators.

“It’s really nuts,” said a second animator. “I’ve worked on projects where things are rewritten — even late in production. But this is another level of craziness.”

Animators and crew members claim they were asked to make alterations to already-approved sequences, and that created a backlog of work in the late stage of production.

“It’s easy to make a movie if you just say, ‘Don’t plan anything’,” the second animator added. “You tell the artists, ‘Come up with stuff. Create the footage and then I’ll decide which direction to go.’ It’s easier to do it that way. But it’s very destructive and time consuming.”

The film, which uses six different animation styles, was originally supposed to debut in April 2022 before being postponed to October that year, and eventually, June 2023. Entertainment Weekly claimed this was due to “pandemic-related delays”; however the four animators say they were hired in spring 2021 and “sat idle” for between three and six months while Lord tinkered with the film in the layout stage.

“Something like 90% of the shots in the trailer are not in the movie,” said a third animator. “We re-engineered or reanimated, had different characters doing the same thing. It was purely a sequence of cool ideas they made us slap together while they ‘rested’ the production.”

This, they say, impacted the rest of the production – resulting in 11-hour days, 7 days a week, for over a year.

Sony Pictures disputes these claims, including those about Lord’s management style. Former Sony chairperson Amy Pascal, who remains a producer on Spider-Man projects, says that it’s unsurprising that over 100 animators left the project, considering that it used over 1,000 animators to bring thousands of Spider-People to the big screen.

“One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right,” Pascal told Vulture. “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.” To the workers who felt demoralized by having to revise final renders five times in a row, the Spider-Verse producer says, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.”

However, Pascal does admit that the film experienced major overhauls to narrative and visuals.

“It really does happen on every film,” said executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks, Michelle Grady. “Truly, honestly, it can be a little bit frustrating, but we always try to explain that this is the process.”

Grady insists that the four animators making these claims are not representative of the majority of the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse crew.

“But show me some construction worker who can put bricks on top of each other again and again then watch it get knocked down on a daily basis,” said a fourth animator.

IGN’s review of Across the Spider-Verse gave it 8/10 and said: “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse surges with visual inventiveness and vibrance in an undeniably strong evolution of the style established in Into the Spider-Verse… Across the Spider-Verse is a more-than-worthy follow-up to an all-time classic.”

Want to read more about Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse? Check out our rankings of all the Spider-Man films as well as our breakdown of all the different Spider-Men we spotted in the movie.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.