The third Spider-Verse movie has been delayed. Again. But don’t roll your eyes just yet—this one’s not your usual “creative differences” dance or post-production fog. No, this is cold scheduling calculus. Sony’s decided that “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” will now land in theaters June 25, 2027, rather than its originally slated June 4 date. Three weeks later. Barely a shrug—until you read between the lines.
This delay isn’t about rewrites, reshoots, or some poor VFX artist sleeping under a desk in Culver City. It’s about school calendars. U.S. kids will be out on summer break, which means more popcorn sold, more TikToks shared, more free marketing from every child with an iPhone and an opinion. Internationally? Same playbook—line up with holiday windows. It’s the kind of maneuver a studio only pulls when they know they’ve got something hot on their hands. Which they do.
Because if there’s one thing Sony’s managed to do right in the last decade—emphasis on one—it’s this animated Spider-Verse saga. The first film, Into the Spider-Verse, dropped like a thunderclap in 2018. An Oscar, no less. Back when the Academy still tried pretending animation was more than just a kids’ table. The sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, pulled $691 million worldwide. Not bad for a cliffhanger.
And now, we wait. Four years between films. That’s a hell of a gap in a franchise that lives on momentum and multiversal whiplash. But maybe that’s not a bad thing.
There’s something old-fashioned, almost stubborn, about the pace Lord and Miller are working at. They’re not cranking these out like Marvel’s TV-adjacent sludge or whatever SPUMC is still pretending to be. (Kraven the Hunter? Madame Web? Morbius? Please.) No, the Spider-Verse crew seems to understand something that’s gone missing from the modern blockbuster: time. Time to build. Time to breathe. Time to make it good.
In the years since Into the Spider-Verse hit, half the industry’s tried to Xerox its animation style, with varying degrees of success and outright laziness. But the original still feels alive. Fluid. Kinetic. A rare example of visual experimentation that doesn’t feel like someone just discovered After Effects last week.
There’s a story that surfaced recently—Ari Aster, director of Hereditary and Eddington, apparently turned down Morbius at one point. Can’t blame him. That tells you everything about the disconnect between Sony’s mainline Marvel offerings and what Lord & Miller are doing over here. One side’s chasing profit margins with zero personality. The other’s making art that also happens to sell tickets. Imagine that.
Now, four years after Across the Spider-Verse left audiences dangling off a narrative cliff, the trilogy’s final chapter is circling its target. Bob Persichetti and Justin K. Thompson are directing, with Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and David Callaham scripting. If those names mean anything to you—and they should—you’ll know this team doesn’t operate on autopilot. They’re architects, not opportunists.
But here’s the thing: even with all this talent, even with the box office and the trophies and the cultural buzz, four years is a long time in kid-movie currency. Audiences age out, trends move on, and attention spans evaporate. Can Beyond the Spider-Verse stick the landing? Or has the multiverse already peaked?
No one knows yet. And that’s a good thing. If cinema has any magic left, it’s in the not-knowing.
The film hits U.S. theaters June 25, 2027. Save the date. Or don’t. If it’s as good as the last two, you’ll hear about it anyway.
