While the long-awaited Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse The sequel won’t hit theaters until next summer at the earliest, with the film originally slated to debut in theaters on April 8 of this year. It was then pushed back to October 2022. afterward a second wave of delays pushed the film back to 2023.
Clearly, at the time Sony made these changes to its release schedule, the games based on the film, titled Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, was already in production. And now they’re starting to hit store shelves, even though the movie doesn’t hit theaters for another ten months or so. And while some of them feature returning characters like Miles Morales or Spider-Gwen, others include characters we already knew were in the movie, like Oscar Isaac’s Spider-Man 2099 (who appeared in the first Spider-Verse‘s post-credits scene), others seemingly reveal new Spider-Men that have yet to be officially announced.
For example, fans have begun to spot a Spider-Verse branded version of the classic board game Trouble. Box and game pieces include Ben Reilly. In Marvel Comics, Ben Reilly is Peter Parker’s clone, who eventually dons his own costume and adopts the superhero identity of Scarlet Spider.
Meanwhile, Target stores across the country have started stocking an item called the Spider-Punk Web-Blast Guitar, which is basically an electronic toy guitar that fires small web-shaped projectiles from the side.
The Spider-Punk character has appeared in many different ones Spider-Verse Marvel Comics. It’s his universe’s version of Spider-Man, but it is not another variation of Peter Parker. Instead, Spider-Punk is actually Hobie Brown, who is the primary version of the Prowler for the Marvel Comics universe. (A different version of the Prowler appeared in Into the Spider-Verse.) Hobby becomes a punk-rock Spidey to fight against his universe’s Norman Osborn, who has succeeded in becoming President of the United States. Marvel gave Spider-Punk his own comic series just a few months ago.
While there’s always the chance that tie-in games will tie into their movies (and a slightly higher chance that a movie will change during production and the characters that it was originally planned to be cut for one reason or another), it would be highly unusual for a game company to sell something as large as a Beyond the Spider-Verse Spider-Punk guitar if he wasn’t in the movie. (Although there is a third possibility in this case: Scarlet Spider and Spider-Punk could not appear inside Beyond the Spider-Verse but could they still appear in the third film, Beyond the Spider-Versewhich is also in production now.)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is currently scheduled to open in theaters on June 2, 2023. Beyond the Spider-Verse next on March 29, 2024.
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