In 2018, Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse struck a chord with audiences on its way to critical and box-office success, as well as an eventual Oscar win for Best Animated Movie. Last year, Sony announced that the sequel, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part 1, would arrive on October 7, 2022. But fans are going to have to wait another eight months to see it. Via Deadline, Sony Pictures has shuffled several release dates ahead of next week’s CinemaCon. And Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is now slated to hit theaters on June 2, 2023.
While Across the Spider-Verse no longer has “Part 1” in its name, it is still a two-part movie. Now, the sequel also has a release date. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part 2 will arrive March 29, 2024. Sony didn’t offer a reason for the delays, but animated films are sometimes more complex to create than live-action movies, so this could simply be a case of giving the animators more time to refine the sequels.
A more perplexing move is Sony’s decision to premiere its Madame Web movie on July 7, 2023, in the middle of the summer and just over a month after Across the Spider-Verse‘s debut. If Across the Spider-Verse has significant box-office legs like its predecessor, Madame Web will arrive just in time for Sony to compete with itself. Another factor working against Madame Web‘s potential success is the fact that the title character is even more obscure than Morbius, and she has never even had her own comic book series. Sony has often boasted about its control of over 900 Spider-Man-related characters, but not all of them can headline a movie. Making this film standout could prove to be a real challenge for the studio.
In other Sony news, the studio is moving its animated film Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile to October 7, the date formerly held by Across the Spider-Verse. The studio’s Korean War drama, Devotion, will have a limited release on October 14, before adding theaters on October 21 ahead of the full release on October 28. Finally, the latest entry in Denzel Washington’s action franchise, The Equalizer 3, will now arrive in theaters on September 1, 2023.
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