Creating an animated film like Sony’s is an intensely collaborative, painstaking process that requires the collective energies and hundreds of hours of work from huge teams of talented people. One does not simply “change” a scene in a movie like this at the drop of a hat, and yet, as any filmmaker will tell you, there are times when changes must be made.
Some of Into the Spider-Verse’s earliest trailers explained the movie’s dimension-hopping plot with shots from the scene where Peter and Miles post up at a local diner and Peter tries to teach Miles about the existence of the multiverse using a handful of French fries splayed out on a table. While the scene in the diner still takes place in theatrical releases of the film, the bit with Peter likening dimensions to fries isn’t, and over the weekend associate editor Andy Leviton explained why.
As much as the movie’s animation and marketing teams loved the moment from the trailer, there was a certain degree of concern that it slowed the film down by over-explaining things that’d already been sufficiently addressed. What apparently led to the fry dialogue being cut, though, was the fact that FX’s Legion had pretty much already done the exact same thing.
6) AND this @LegionFX scene just happened to be shot at a diner we always ate at near our office in Culver City, S&W Diner. This was seriously all coincidental. Everyone at work LOVED me the next day when I showed them this episode. (<— Sarcasm)…
— Andy! Leviton (@AlliterAndy) March 4, 2019
In “Chapter 14,” the sixth episode of the show’s second season, we’re introduced to a number of alternate versions of David Haller, whose life plays out in drastically different ways based on his having made important decisions that change the trajectory of his destiny.
One David, an office gofer, lucks his way into a high-power job with the help of his uncontrolled telepathy. Another David is homeless and mentally ill, wandering the streets looking for shelter, and yet another works a dead-end job at a grocery store. One of the Davids, a drug addict, is the only one with the slightest inkling of the fact that he’s merely the product of one particular series of events, and he explains it to a friend in a diner with the help of cold, soggy French fries.
Ultimately, Into the Spider-Verse’s diner scene went through a bit more editing so as not to too closely resemble Legion, which is probably for the best. For the theory enthusiasts out there, though, this’ll add yet another (albeit tenuous and not at all text-of-the-film canon) connection between Sony’s Spider-Man franchise and the rest of Marvel’s cinematic empire.