The buzz around Stan Lee’s cameo in ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ started to mount early. It wasn’t the first time the signature cameo saw some advance hype, but it was one of the rare occasions that the cameo actually lived up to that hype. No spoilers (Though if you still haven’t seen the movie, you should really do something about that…), but suffice it to say that it’s a very poignant moment in the film. That almost certainly would have been the case regardless, but the fact is that the emotional weight of the scene was only amplified by Lee’s recent passing. But it turns out there’s more there than any of us realized.
New York Times writer Kyle Buchannan spoke with the film’s directors – Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman – at the Golden Globes award ceremony earlier this week. And as Buchannan reported on Twitter, the triumvirate revealed that Stan Lee actually has more than one appearance in the film. Several more, actually. It’s only fitting that this should be the case in a movie about the Spider-people of infinite earths (Can I make that reference?) joining forces to save the multiverse. But where are these other cameos, and how did we miss it? Well it turns out that the additional cameos are non-speaking appearances in crowd scenes and the like.
The directors explained that these crowd cameos are essentially Easter eggs that came to be as a result of virtually every animator who worked on the film wanting to animate the comic book legend. So where might we find them? Well, we’re not likely to get any more specific than “crowd scenes” for the time being, as the directors declined to elaborate, instead challenging fans to find them when the film arrives on blu-ray. That’s right, ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ just turned into a two hour game of “Where’s Stan?”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly heard worse excuses to rewatch a Spider-Man movie.
‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ is now playing in theaters. The film stars Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Liev Schreiber, Kathryn Hahn, Nicolas Cage, and Bryan Tyree Henry.
