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Sony hired over 1,000 animators to make the second Spider-Verse movie. More than 100 of them quit during production, burned out by schedules that ran seven days a week. The film made $328 million in profit. More than Oppenheimer. Sony bought the rights to make Spider-Man movies in 1999 for $7 million. Every Spider-Man film since has made over $11 billion at the box office combined. The animated Spider-Verse films are the most profitable of all of them, dollar for dollar. First film: $90 million to make, $384 million back. The sequel cost $100 million and brought in $690 million, and Deadline calculated its profit at $328 million. Christopher Nolan's three-hour atomic bomb film made $201 million by the same math, $127 million less. There's a simple reason why: Sony keeps all the money from the animated films. When Tom Holland makes a live-action Spider-Man, Disney puts up 25% of the budget and takes 25% of what it earns. The animated films have no such deal. A 2023 Vulture report found animators pulled 11-hour shifts for close to a year on Across the Spider-Verse. Phil Lord, one of the producers, reportedly insisted on personally approving every shot, overruling the film's three directors and sending scenes back for up to five rounds of changes. Beyond the Spider-Verse was supposed to come out in March 2024 and is now arriving June 18, 2027. The release date changed four separate times. At a movie industry event last year, the directors said they refused to "run it back" and needed the time. An animator told Vulture back in 2023 that the third film hadn't even started while the second was still being finished. When this movie opens, the trilogy will have taken eight and a half years. The first film came out in December 2018. The original Star Wars trilogy took six. Sony scheduled Brand New Day (Holland's live-action Spider-Man) for July 2026 and pushed the animated film to 2027 so the two wouldn't steal each other's audience. They've also approved a Spider-Women spin-off and a Spider-Punk film that Daniel Kaluuya is co-writing. Two animated films cost $190 million to make and earned $1.08 billion back. Sony gave this team four years because every number on the spreadsheet said to.