Films about extra-dimensional travel and parallel versions of ourselves aren’t restricted to the realm of comic-book nerdery the reigning Best Picture winner at the hoary Oscars is all about “verse-jumping,” after all. The gravitas Isaac's Across the Spider-Verse performance lends to the character takes what would be otherwise ludicrous and makes it as indelible as Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet or Richard Harris's King Arthur.Multiverses are, at this point, familiar ground for Hollywood.
Characters like Miles Morales and, now, Miguel O'Hara only add to that cultural permanence. Spider-Man is the most powerful superhero at the box office, but more importantly, he's a mythic, generational figure. "Is this the stupidest thing?" he asked himself when deciding to take on these comic book roles. In a 2022 roundtable with other actors, Isaac revealed he has concerns about the big franchises he's a part of. Before that, he suited up in an ostentatious costume as the blue-faced En Sabah Nur in X-Men: Age of Apocalypse. Most recently, he was Steven Grant and Marc Spector in Moon Knight. He's also played multiple Marvel characters in previous projects. From Ex Machina to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, he's become a massive star.
Yet, instead of a beloved uncle paying the price for his self-serving interests, it was an entire reality. It's why, in the comics, he's more inclined to kill his enemies than other Spider-Men. Unlike most Spider-People, Miguel didn't have an "Uncle Ben" to motivate him to be a hero. Instead, as he explains to Miles in Across the Spider-Verse, it ends up breaking "canon," resulting in the destruction of that particular reality. Miguel tried to stay in that timeline, raising his counterpart's daughter. Miguel's story about traveling to an alternate future where his counterpart died is an invention of the film.
In trying to purge himself of this affliction, Miguel ended up splicing his DNA with a spider's, and the rest is Marvel Comics history. His evil boss, Tyler Stone, drugged him with an Alchemax substance that creates a genetic-level addiction. In the books, Miguel worked for Alchemax, a megacorporation that was trying to splice human DNA with animal genes.
Both are genius-level geneticists and very intense when it comes to their approach to being a superhero. In Across the Spider-Verse, the Spider-Man of 2099 shares some of his comics counterpart's backstory. The combination of a Latin first name and Irish surname seems a nod to a kind of Star Trek optimism about a multicultural future. Created in 1992 by Peter David and Rick Leonardi, Spider-Man 2099 is named Miguel O'Hara.
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