Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse — Easter Eggs & Hidden Details

Tucked into the studio logos is an approval stamp from the Comics Code Authority, the industry self-censorship body that policed comic book content from 1954 until it dissolved in 2011. Its seal appeared on virtually every Silver Age Spider-Man issue, so opening a movie built to look like a printed comic with the old badge is a perfect tone-setter. Listen closely too: an audible cough with accompanying on-screen text continues Chris Miller's running logo-gag, which he and Phil Lord have hidden in their productions since 21 Jump Street.

Gwen opens the film narrating from behind her drum kit as her band The Mary Janes plays — the same band she drums for in her 2014 comic debut. As she recaps her origin, the film flashes real panel compositions from Edge of Spider-Verse #2 by Jason Latour and Robbi Rodriguez, including her fight with the Lizard, who on Earth-65 is a bullied Peter Parker who took a serum at the school dance. Her first line, "Let's do things differently," deliberately inverts the "Let's do this one last time" opening that every narrator used in Into the Spider-Verse.

Earth-65 isn't just painted in watercolor to match the Latour/Rodriguez Spider-Gwen comics — the color itself is keyed to Gwen's emotional state, shot by shot. Producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller described her world as "a mood ring": when she gets angry, a red wash literally bleeds into the environment; when she and her father finally talk honestly, the palette softens around them. The crew built new tools (including the painting software Rebelle and custom brush systems) to layer living watercolor washes over 3D animation, a technique that had never been done at this scale.

Hanging over the door of Gwen's bedroom is a trans pride flag reading "PROTECT TRANS KIDS" — and it's not alone. Eagle-eyed viewers spotted a matching trans-flag pin on Captain Stacy's police uniform, and the pink-white-blue palette saturates both scenes where Gwen confronts her father about who she really is. Whether it reads as Gwen being trans or as a deliberate trans allegory about coming out to a parent, the filmmakers have left it ambiguous — but the set dressing is unmistakably intentional. Her room also hides an Ultimate Fallout poster, the 2011 issue where Miles Morales first appeared.

During Gwen's Guggenheim brawl with a Renaissance-universe Vulture — a living da Vinci sketch, complete with parchment textures and Italian muttering — a bystander repeats "I think it's a Banksy," the deadpan line Post Malone's cameo character delivered in Into the Spider-Verse. The fight stacks another callback on top: when Vulture pulls a replacement wing out of thin air, Miguel O'Hara grumbles about "hammerspace," the cartoon-physics pocket dimension that let John Mulaney's Spider-Ham produce a giant mallet from nowhere in the first film.

Cleaning up after the Vulture incident, Miguel O'Hara gripes about not wanting another multiverse mess like "Doctor Strange and that little nerd back on Earth-199999." That's the official Marvel designation for the Marvel Cinematic Universe — meaning the botched spell from Spider-Man: No Way Home is canon within the Spider-Verse films, and Miguel apparently had to help clean up the fallout. It's the most direct bridge yet between Sony's animated multiverse and the MCU, delivered as a throwaway insult aimed at Tom Holland's Peter Parker.

Jonathan Ohnn, the villain-of-the-week who becomes the saga's big bad, isn't a new face at all. He was a scientist at Alchemax in Into the Spider-Verse — the collider explosion that sent the other Spiders home is what riddled his body with portals. Even better, he's the specific background scientist Miles hit with a bagel while escaping the lab, a grudge The Spot airs out loud mid-fight. A one-frame background gag from 2018 became the origin story of the franchise's most dangerous villain, which is exactly the kind of long game this series loves to play.

The Earth-13122 LEGO sequence — where a brick-built Spider-Man alerts the Spider Society — was animated by Preston Mutanga, a 14-year-old from Toronto. After his shot-for-shot LEGO recreation of the film's trailer went viral in January 2023, producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller tracked him down (Miller admitted it looked "incredibly sophisticated for a nonadult" to have made, and the team half-joked "Is that legal?") and hired him to build the scene from his bedroom PC over roughly three months of after-school work. The LEGO universe also features J.K. Simmons' J. Jonah Jameson in plastic form.

Pavitr Prabhakar's home of Mumbattan — a Mumbai/Manhattan mashup — is wallpapered with jokes. A giant billboard hypes "Sacred Wars," this universe's riff on Marvel's Secret Wars crossover event, the storyline that made multiverse incursions a comics staple. Pavitr himself is pulled straight from the 2004 Spider-Man: India comic, right down to the yoyo-like web bracelets, and his fighting style draws on the Indian martial art kalaripayattu. His gleeful rant about the West saying "chai tea" — literally "tea tea" — became the sequence's most quoted gag.

One background billboard features a giant bagel and the slogan "All of it, Always, All Over the Place" — a wink at fellow multiverse movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, which swept the Oscars months before this film opened and famously used an "everything bagel" as its symbol of multiversal nihilism. Given that a bagel also created The Spot, the Spider-Verse crew clearly knew what they were doing when they picked the imagery. It's pure freeze-frame material: blink during the multiverse-hopping stretch and you'll sail right past it.

Spider-Punk isn't just drawn like a Sex Pistols album collage — he's animated like one, down to individual body parts. As the crew explained to befores & afters, Hobie's jacket moves on 4s (six drawings per second), his body on 3s (sometimes 2s), and his guitar drags along on 6s, so the character never quite syncs with himself. The directors wanted him to feel "hand cut, pasted, drawn, glued together," like a photocopied zine come to life. Once you notice it, every Hobie scene becomes a flip-book you can't unsee — anti-establishment down to the frame rate.

Co-director Justin K. Thompson said before release that around 280 Spider-variants appear in the film; post-release counts put the final number closer to 630, with about 150 uniquely named designs. The deep cuts are relentless: Spider-Cat and Spider-Rex, Bombastic Bag-Man (Peter in a Fantastic Four suit and paper bag), the sentient Spider-Mobile Peter Parkedcar, wheelchair-using Sun-Spider born from a fan Spidersona contest, soundtrack producer Metro Boomin's personal Spidersona, and a Spider-Man from the 1967 cartoon rendered as a static image that literally cannot move — because in the '60s show, he barely did.

The Spider-Man from the beloved-but-cancelled 2008 series The Spectacular Spider-Man appears as a Spider Society member — with Josh Keaton back in the role for the first time since 2009. Co-director Joaquim Dos Santos explained to Collider that the cameo was personal: he was a storyboard artist on the show, and Keaton is a longtime friend who later starred in Dos Santos' Voltron. For a fanbase that spent 14 years campaigning for a season three, hearing that voice again was the film's quietest gut-punch. Keaton's Peter even gets a couple of lines, including recalling Captain Stacy's death.

The Peter Parker from Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man games (Earth-1048) joins the Society chase, complete with the white-spider Advanced Suit — and Yuri Lowenthal actually recorded new lines for the cameo, telling CBR and CinemaBlend he was thrilled to see "our version" of the web-slinger inspire other creators. The games get a second nod earlier: Miles' roommate Ganke plays a Marvel's Spider-Man 2-style game featuring the Iron Spider suit, months before the real game shipped. The first film only teased the PS4 suit as an in-joke; this one makes video game Spidey a full citizen of the multiverse.

Peter B. Parker's baby daughter Mayday — named for Spider-Girl, the future web-slinger of the MC2 comics — crawls around in a onesie patterned after Spider-Ham, implying Peter B. commissioned custom pajamas honoring John Mulaney's cartoon pig from the first film. Her crib doubles down on the family business: it's stocked with a plush Green Goblin and a stuffed octopus that looks suspiciously like a certain doctor's namesake. Between the pajamas, the plushies, and her tiny pink hair tuft, Peter B. is raising the multiverse's most on-brand toddler.

As Miles is escorted through Spider Society HQ, one containment cell holds a live-action Donald Glover in full Prowler gear — reprising Aaron Davis from Spider-Man: Homecoming, where his character name-dropped a nephew named Miles. The directors told ComicBook.com the cameo came together astonishingly late: Glover shot the scene just weeks before release, and early test screenings used a cardboard stand-in. Character designer Kris Anka later shared concept art labeled "MCU Prowler," pinning this as the Homecoming character, now a captured multiverse anomaly.

During Miles' escape from the Society, a training hologram of Doc Ock barks "Hello, Peter" — Alfred Molina's iconic greeting from Spider-Man 2, the same line No Way Home already memed into eternity. The Spot gets his own Raimi riff: his boast about holding "the power of the multiverse in the palm of my hand" reworks Ock's "power of the sun" speech. And when Miles and Gwen hang upside-down together over the city, the framing nods to the most famous upside-down moment in Spider-Man movie history, from the 2002 original.

Testing his growing powers, The Spot portals into a live-action convenience store — Mrs. Chen's shop from the Venom films, with Peggy Lu reprising her role in newly shot footage. Officially designated Earth-688 (Sony's Spider-Man Universe), the scene has Chen utterly unimpressed by an animated villain poking out of her counter while he swipes snacks off the shelf. It quietly stitches the Venomverse into Spider-Verse canon, and makes Lu one of the very few actors to play the same character across both a live-action franchise and an animated one.