Here’s what happens at the end of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and how the film’s closing moments set up its 2024 sequel.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023).
Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) was never meant to be Spider-Man. At least, not the version of Miles that viewers met for the first time in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
This information is revealed early on in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse by Jonathan Ohnn, aka The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), a former scientist who was turned into a multidimensional being when Miles and his web-slinging friends destroyed Wilson Fisk’s (Liev Schreiber) Super-Collider at the end of Into the Spider-Verse. Ohnn insists that he is Miles’ archnemesis not only because Miles’ actions resulted in his transformation, but also because it was one of Ohnn’s early experiments with Fisk’s Super-Collider that brought the radioactive spider that gave Miles his powers into their universe.
Ohnn’s comments initially fall on deaf ears, but when Miles later travels to Nueva York with Gwen Stacy (Hawkeye‘s Hailee Steinfeld), Jessica Drew (Issa Rae), and Spider-Punk (Daniel Kaluuya), he discovers that The Spot wasn’t just blustering. There, Miles finally comes face-to-face with Miguel O’Hara aka Spider-Man 2099 (Moon Knight‘s Oscar Isaac), who explains that the Spider-Verse is held together by “The Canon.” According to Miguel, The Canon refers to a collection of events that are responsible for creating every universe’s Spider-Man — namely, the death of a loved one and the demise of a kindhearted police captain.
