Jan 12, 2024

Chris Miller and Phil Lord, producers of "Spider-Verse," promote the animated Oscar contender on their late-night show.

Awards season is heating up, and some of the biggest names in this year's animated feature nominations are campaigning to promote their films.

Sony Pictures Animation's "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" is one of the top contenders for this year's Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and celebrity super-producers and screenwriters Chris Miller and Phil Lord recently announced that "Late Night with Seth Meyers" to stop by and talk about the Spidey sequel.

After Miller and Lord laid out a list of popular IPs that have been adapted into films in the past, such as "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs," "21 Jump Street," "Lego," and now "Spider-Man." Myers asked about his approach to working with material that already has a dedicated fan base.

According to Lord,

we try not to play tight.

Miller added that working with established IP is:

like a Trojan horse. Even if it seems like a bad idea, something that fans would think, 'It's like '21 Jump Street, what are we going to do with that,' we're interested in it.

Elaborating further, in a later response about their work as a duo, Miller explained:

We talk about something a lot and try to figure out what is interesting, what is new, what is fresh, what is different. We don't want to do what we've done before. So every time, we think, "What is something no one has seen before?" That's the first assignment. And when we find something that we don't know how to do, but we think would be interesting if it worked, we get excited enough to dive into that project [Lord says that partnerships often produce results that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The interview is short, but Miller and Lord discuss how they became friends, how Miller set Lord's girlfriend's hair on fire in college, their early careers, and what they call "the most ambitious animated film ever attempted" They were able to sneak in a brief story about working with more than 1,000 artists for