Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2: Dave Callaham began writing a year before the original was released

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a big surprise. In the midst of the highly-kinetic adventure that was just oozing with comic-book style was a story filled with an incredible amount of heart. Sony officially got the ball rolling on a sequel a few weeks before the release of the film that would be scripted by Christopher Miller, Phil Lord, and Dave Callaham, but unofficially, they had already been working on the script for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 for a year.

While speaking with THR, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings co-writer Dave Callaham explained how Phil Lord and Christopher Miller approached him about working on the Spider-Verse sequel. At that point, there wasn’t any finished animated for Callaham to look at, so he initially had no idea how much this thing would blow up.

They said, “We have this animated Spider-Man movie we are doing.” They were still working on the first movie. They couldn’t tell me what it was going to look like. Because it’s them, I said, “I’ll come in and see what you have. I don’t get it.” They showed me an animatic, which at the time looked like napkin drawings with temp vocals and no animation styling behind it. I could feel the heart behind it, but I couldn’t imagine how spectacular this thing could be yet. They showed me some still images of some of the art they had been working on. With them, I trust them implicitly and I believed they were going to do something special. I said, “OK,” and they said, “Great. Pitch us a sequel.” So I began the very strange process of working on the sequel for a year before the original came out.

So Dave Callaham worked with Lord and Miller on the script for Into The Spider-Verse 2 for a year, but no one else had any interest in what he was doing; safe to say, that all changed when the first film finally hit theaters. “It wasn’t until that movie came out that it made any sense to anybody in the outside world what it was that I was up to,” Callaham said. “Then suddenly the interest went from zero to 100 overnight. Suddenly people loved the movie and a couple of months later it wins an Oscar and then the trajectory changes a little bit.” Given how long they’ve been working on the script, you might expect that it’d be completed by now, but Callaham said that the process continues and that he’s still writing with Lord and Miller, even saying that he’s sure they’ll “be writing stuff for that movie until it releases.“

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is currently playing in theaters (check out our review), and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse 2 is currently slated for an October 7, 2022 release.