Spider-Punk may have been one of the best characters in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; however, the newly announced movie is going to have to overcome one big problem.
While Spider-Man fans wait for Beyond the Spider-Verse to arrive in 2027, they were given some exciting news earlier today: a new spin-off movie focused on Daniel Kaluuya’s Spider-Punk character is now in early development at Sony Pictures Animation. Just about everyone who saw Across the Spider-Verse came out of that movie loving and praising Spider-Punk, so the move makes perfect sense and could result in a really fun, really entertaining flick.
Emphasis on the “could” part of that sentence. Despite how cool Spider-Punk was in Across the Spider-Verse, the movie could still be facing an uphill battle.
The source material for Spider-Punk is one-note compared to the rest of Marvel
Created by Dan Slott and Olivier Coipel, the Spider-Punk/Hobie Brown character first appeared in 2015’s The Amazing Spider-Man #10, which was part of the “Spider-Verse” storyline. That makes Hobie approximately 10 years old in Marvel Comics, which is relatively young, though that isn’t inherently a bad thing. Comic book movies have adapted even newer characters than that (or just created original ones) before. What it does mean, however, is that the film doesn’t have a lot of source material to go off of.
This is especially true because Spider-Punk has largely been tied to Spider-Man and Spider-Verse events throughout his comics history, as he didn’t get his own solo series until 2022. That five-issue miniseries — and the four-issue sequel, Spider-Punk: Arms Race, which arrived in 2024 (both series come from Cody Ziglar and Justin Mason) — begin to flesh out Hobie’s home, Earth-138; although, a lot of what we’ve seen so far is introductions without much further characterization.
This world’s Captain America is Captain Anarchy. Ironheart is Riotheart. Hulk has a mohawk and tattoos, and Daredevil is a drummer out of Philadelphia. They’re in a band together and will help Hobie out in a pinch, sure, but there’s not too much to any of them beyond those generic anti-establishment stereotypes.
Spider-Punk’s generic anti-establishment stereotypes will struggle with politically exhausted audiences
There are some fun ideas in those aforementioned Spider-Punk series — a Venomized Norman Osborn becomes President of the United States and begins ordering live executions, which feels like it’d be ripe for some commentary — but the actual source material doesn’t give co-writers Kaluuya and Ajon Singh enough to hang a movie off of.
Hopefully, Kaluuya and Singh are making this movie because they do have their own story with their own angle they want to tell, but if they are just leaning on the comics? We’re in for something that’s going to be relatively surface-level and just going to add to the non-stop political culture war. Superman got labeled “woke” by Fox News before it was ever released because, uh, James Gunn accurately explained the character’s comics origins, so you can already start to imagine what kind of conversations that are going to arise if someone named Captain Anarchy shows up.
That’s not me arguing against Captain Anarchy’s presence; if Kaluuya and Singh have a good take on the character, by all means, I hope they do it — I just hope we get to see a fully fleshed-out world that isn’t just trendy buzz words that are thrown in there to check a box or be divisive. Let’s see a fully-realized story, a fully-realized world, and fully-realized characters, please and thank you.
