It’s no secret that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will contain a lot of Spider-People. While Into the Spider-Verse welcomed in some wild variants like Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Noir, John Mulaney’s Peter Porker, and, of course, Spider-Gwen (Hailee Steinfeld), trailers from the sequel are clearly opening the door for just about every possible web-slinger the film can get. To get a definitive answer on just how much Spider fans can expect from Across the Spider-Verse, Collider’s own Steve Weintraub sat down for an interview with directors Kemp Powers, Joaquim Dos Santos, and Justin Thompson who gave a specific number of Spider-People to look out for.
Some of these new Spider-People are expected to play major roles in the film like Daniel Kaluuya’s Spider-Punk. As one of Gwen Stacy’s best pals who shares in her love of music, he’ll be a source of jealousy for Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) in this love story between the two Spiders from other worlds. There’s also Miguel O’Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099, played by the always amazing Oscar Isaac, who Miles will butt heads with as they try to protect the multiverse from the threat that is Jason Schwartzman’s The Spot. That’s without mentioning Spider-Woman (Issa Rae), Spider-Man India (Karan Soni), the returning Peter B. Parker (Jake Johnson), and even Spider-Cat!
Apparently, that’s just scratching the surface. Thompson revealed there’s a staggering number of Spider-People packed into the film’s lengthy runtime, even when cutting it down to just named characters:
“The exact number? Oh boy, we kept adding, like all the way up until the very end. Honestly, I’m gonna be level with you, we just finished the film, like in the last like two weeks, and I don’t think I’ve had time to pause and actually take a final count. But I think it was about 280 the last time I looked in. Just to be clear, that doesn’t mean specific, unique characters that you might recognize, it might mean variations as well. But if you’re just talking about named characters, then I think there’s probably about 95.”