SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE Cut a Wonderful/Terrible Spider-Ham Joke at the Last Minute

We know that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse cut about ten minutes of fully animated scenes, and we also know that they axed some gags earlier in the process in service of the story, but co-writer and co-director Rodney Rothman recently spilled the beans on a Spider-Ham joke they cut after screening audiences loved it.

I’ll let Rothman explain. The joke was in the scene in which all the alternate universe Spider-Persons tell Miles about their losses. He told Jeff Smith on The Q&A podcast:

“The way that scene went is Noir said he lost his Uncle Benjamin, Peter lost Uncle Ben, and Gwen lost Peter. We went through everyone. Spider-Ham said he lost his Uncle Frankfurter. And then he said, ‘He was electrocuted, and it smelled so good.’”

That is an amazing joke, but I get why they cut it. They had a pretty fine line to walk with Peter Porker, I think. Setting aside the fact that the movie is about a super-powered teenager trying to stop the multiverse from collapsing in on itself, Miles’s story is very grounded and real. Spider-Ham is not. Rothman admitted that the character was fairly divisive. “He was simultaneously the most popular and the least popular character."

I think they did an excellent job threading the needle. I think it was pretty much a perfect movie. Every moment with Spider-Ham was a delight, but too much of him would have gotten old really fast. That said, I really hope that cut joke ends up on the Blu-ray, because Rothman said it killed.

Via: CB