Warning: This article contains spoilers about some minor and unimportant Easter eggs in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a wild experience all the way through, but its wildest part has to be the time we spend at the headquarters of the cross-dimensional Spider-Society. During these scenes we encounter what feels like every ridiculous idea for a Spider-Person that Marvel has ever come up with. It’s delightful.
But the Spider-Society is hiding a bunch of other Easter eggs, too. In their efforts at policing the multiverse, the various Spider-Folk have captured a bunch of baddies who were in the wrong dimension. They hold them in a little jail at the Spider-Society until they can send them back to where they belong.
One of those misplaced bad guys being held by the Spiders is Kraven the Hunter. But this is not a comic book version of the character–it’s the version of Kraven who will be one of the antagonists of the Spider-Man 2 video game when it hits the PlayStation 5 later this year. If you saw the gameplay footage and trailer from Sony’s showcase a couple weeks ago, then you should recognize him pretty easily.
And nearby, amusingly, is the Peter Parker Spider-Man from that game–voice actor Yuri Lowenthal even got a quip in.
If you can believe it, this actually wasn’t the first appearance by that game (or at least the series it’s a part of) in Across the Spider-Verse. In one of the early scenes, Miles’s school roommate Ganke is actually playing a real-life current-gen Spider-Man game. The clip was so quick, however, that it was tough to tell whether it was the existing Miles game or the new one. But, considering the presence of Kraven in the later scene, Ganke probably was playing Spider-Man 2. Lucky guy.
If you’re worried that these bits are obnoxious or annoying, don’t be. Admittedly, the PS5 stuff is less fun and interesting than, say, a housecat wearing a Spider-Man costume, but these appearances are very quick–they don’t last long enough to grate. And they’re sandwiched in between lots of dazzling sights and sounds, so even if you do find them to be irritating in some big way, you’ll find something else that amuses you within seconds.
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