Ivan Reitman Secretly Helped With SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE and Here's How

Here’s a fun bit of trivia regarding the amazing animated film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. That movie is one of my favorite Spider-Man films; I just loved how that story played out and I was blown away by its wild and cool animation style.

Well, it turns out that producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller got a little help on the movie from filmmaker legend Ivan Reitman! You know, the guy who directed Ghostbusters, Stripes, and Meatballs. During a recent interview with Empire, Lord and Miller revealed that after they showed Reitman the movie, the filmmaker told them that half of the movie was the best movie he'd ever seen, but the other half was "terrible."

Lord and Miller wrote, "We laughed super-hard. He wasn't laughing. We had just screened Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse for one of our movie heroes, Ivan Reitman. And he was about to spend a week helping us make our movie better, for no reason other than he thought it could be."

Reitman ended up giving the producers notes with ways to improve the film and they addressed those issues. In fact, the notes he provided helped the film significantly, and they did make the movie better. When Reitman saw the final product, he had a much different reaction.

The producers went on to share, "We did the notes. And lots of other people's too, and lo, the movie got better. We showed the next cut to some friends, and Ivan came. Halfway through, we looked over to see what Ivan was doing, but we didn't have to. 'Cause we could hear it. We elbowed each other… Ivan Reitman was laughing."

I love this story. I love that Reitman played a part in helping make this amazing animated movie! I’d love to see the notes and what elements from them that the creative team actually implemented in the movie.