Fresh off its Oscar win for Best Animated Feature, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is set to hit homes soon. That’s put renewed focus on one of the best movies of 2018 and, in my humble opinion, one of the best superhero films ever made. One of the things we’ve known from previous reports is that there was a lot of unused material, much of it focusing on Miles Morales’ best friend and roommate, Ganke, who only had a couple of brief appearances.
What we didn’t know was the reason why Ganke’s scenes were cut, and it turns out, according to co-director Bob Persichetti, that there was just too much of a similarity between Ganke and Spider-Man: Homecoming‘s Ned Leeds…
“The alt version is more beholden to the idea that Miles and Ganke were buddies and roommates, and there’s a lot more of roommate stuff happening,” revealed director Bob Persichetti to Cinemablend. “And what we ended up running into was just to two things. It was just like, ‘Oh, wow. Homecoming, Ned – very similar to Ganke.’ Really. And then, ‘Well, maybe it’s actually better if Miles experiences these things without a really well-educated Sherpa holding his hand through all the powers coming on and everything,’ and it ended up helping us out for that place where Peter comes into the movie.”
Thankfully, that extra footage will see the light of day as an alternate universe cut of the movie, explains co-director Rodney Rothman…
“[‘Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse’] had an unusual amount of material at every stage of production. So, an insane amount of storyboard material, like insane, like break your high end edit systems insane. An insane amount of layout, an insane amount of finished animation that didn’t make it into the movie… an unusual amount. So the Alt-Universe Cut contains a bunch of that stuff that we chose not to put in the movie, but that in an alternate universe easily could have ended up in the movie. So, uh, that’s kind of the premise behind it.”
And according to Slashfilm, Ganke’s role would have been voiced by Pixar director Peter Sohn, best known for his work on The Good Dinosaur. Pretty cool. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is available now on digital, while a Blu-ray release arrives on March 19th.
