Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is set to bring the famed webslinger back to the big screen this summer, with Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales all but ready to carve himself out as the fourth franchise Spider-Man of the 21st century along with Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Tom Holland.
Moore’s fellow Spidey stars have already teamed up on screen in the MCU’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, which just might go down as one of the most potent nostalgia fountains in history, but while the Spider-Verse franchise had no part in Marvel’s biggest team-up since Endgame, it only means that Across the Spider-Verse has the space to do one better than the MCU in the best department possible; the pointing meme.
While the three Spider-Men in No Way Home were prime real estate to recreate the classic “pointing Spider-Man” meme, the internet-famous screencap from the 19th episode of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, their capitalization on it may not be very fresh in everyone’s heads, with either instance not amounting to much more than a vague, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it caricature of the original meme.
But thanks to the freshly released Across the Spider-Verse trailer, we’ve gotten to see how a true homage-happy franchise incorporates its memes, going the distance to not only recreate that familiar frame but to up the total amount of pointing by several orders of Spidey-specific magnitude thanks to the denizens of the Spider-Society.
As if that wasn’t enough, Across the Spider-Verse further proved its ability to tango with No Way Home by directly referencing the Marvel Cinematic Universe in its latest trailer, inadvertently generating more hype for the MCU than the franchise itself seems to have been able to do as of late.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, memes and all, releases in cinemas on June 2.