The Spider Society was probably one of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse‘s biggest draws — it certainly took up a lot of the film’s promo — and its appearance did not disappoint. Now, co-director Justin K. Thompson has revealed just how many Spider-Totems are working for the Society.
In a new interview with Empire, IGN notes that Thompson made a comment which seemingly confirms the number of Spider-People in the film. “If we take the sequence as a whole, there are over 600 different spiders,” Thompson said of the sequence in which Miles (Shameik Moore) flees from the Society. “It’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 630-ish.” While the number isn’t an exact figure, it does give us our best estimate at how many heroes Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac) managed to recruit.
In the first film, just a few multiversal Spider-Totems were dragged into the action. The second film, however, decided to go all out, and it’s created millions of new fans for some of the more prominent Spider-People in the film, including Spider-Woman/Jess Drew (Issa Rae), Spider-Punk/Hobie Brown (Daniel Kaluuya), and Spider-Man India/Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni).
Needless to say, while hundreds of these appearances were mere cameos, the film did an excellent job at developing its large cast of supporting characters. In fact, the film manages to include a nice balance of fan service and creative risks – something that many superhero movies struggle to achieve with a much smaller roster of characters. Here’s hoping the third film brings the Spider-Verse saga to a satisfying close – and that it brings us more Spider-Characters to cheer over.