Every Spider-Verse Rule You Need to Know Before Across the Spider-Verse

Now that the first trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has dropped, I wanted to lay down the established rules of the Spider-Verse so we are all ready for Miles and Gwen's trip across the multiverse. If portals have been opening and snatching up random people, and now Miles himself is about to hop between dimensions, it helps to know exactly how this multiverse actually works before the sequel hits.

Leaving Your Home Universe Comes at a Deadly Cost

The first and most important rule of the Spider-Verse is that if you leave your own universe, your molecules are not going to be happy about it. This is a core plot driver of Into the Spider-Verse, where all the spider people who were not native to Miles's home universe, designated Earth-1610, began to have their physical forms disintegrate and glitch out because their atoms did not like being somewhere they did not belong. As Peter Parker puts it in the film, "You stay in this dimension too long your body's going to disintegrate." Human beings, or spider people for that matter, were not meant to travel across the Spider-Verse to different universes because it is literally against the natural law of the multiverse.

That raises an obvious question though. In the Across the Spider-Verse trailer we see a whole crowd of spider people just chilling out, cool and relaxed, presumably also traveling across the multiverse just like Miles and Gwen. So why are they not glitching out?

Spider-Man 2099's Wrist Bracelet Is the Key to Traveling Safely

That leads to rule two, which is that you need one of Spider-Man 2099's wrist bracelet gizmos to traverse the Spider-Verse without your body falling apart. This rule was established in the post-credits scene of Into the Spider-Verse, when we first meet Miguel O'Hara, Spider-Man 2099, and his AI Lyla tells him he is about to make the first autonomous jump across the multiverse. She says this right after flashes of Miles, Gwen, Peter and the rest of the gang stopping Kingpin appear on her holographic monitors. This wrist gizmo seems to be the key to Miguel jumping across the Spider-Verse without disintegrating, since he is not native to any of the universes he visits. Looking closely at the Across the Spider-Verse trailer, every spider person shown has a unique variation of Miguel's bracelet gizmo fastened on their left wrist, which strongly implies these bracelets are necessary for all of them to gather in alternate realities without glitching out. These bracelets are going to be extremely important in the new film since Miles and Gwen are about to go on a road trip across the Spider-Verse. The bracelets also facilitate travel itself, as shown at the end of Into the Spider-Verse when Spider-Man 2099 meets the Spider-Man from the original 1990s Spider-Man cartoon, leading to the exchange "who the heck are you" and "how dare you point at me, you were pointing first, rude to point, you're being very rude."

DNA Is What Actually Opens the Doorway Between Universes

Having the bracelet on your physical body seems extremely important, which brings us to the next rule: DNA is required, especially if you want to navigate the Spider-Verse in search of other spider people. The use of DNA to search across the multiverse was a big part of Into the Spider-Verse, as the DNA of Chris Pine's Peter Parker was accidentally used to summon all the spider people from their respective dimensions at the start of the movie. While that Peter Parker is fighting Green Goblin at Kingpin's Alchemax facility, Green Goblin accidentally shoves Peter's head into the middle of the Alchemax super collider, and Kingpin is not happy when this happens. During that experiment, the super collider was locking onto the DNA of both Kingpin's dead wife Vanessa and dead son Richard, in an attempt to pull in multiverse variants of his lost loved ones, which is why Peter Parker implies to Kingpin, right before Kingpin kills him, that he saw variants of Vanessa and Richard while his head was inside the machine. However, Peter Parker's spider DNA got thrown into the mix, which caused the super collider to lock onto the five spider totems of the five universes that were already colliding with the 1610 universe while the door was open, as indicated by their Earth designations on the Alchemax computer screen.

Meet the Five Spider-Verses Pulled Into Miles's World

Miles Morales's native universe is Earth-1610, just like in the comics, and it is referred to as the Ultimate Universe, the universe where Miles Morales was first introduced to the world. The universes drawn toward his world are Peter B. Parker's Earth-616, the main Marvel universe home to the original Peter Parker Spider-Man, essentially the Sony Spider-Verse equivalent of that comic universe. Then there is Gwen Stacy from Earth-65, likely a reference to the year Gwen Stacy was introduced, 1965. Next is Earth-14512, home to Peni Parker and her mech, where an alphanumeric cipher on the numbers 14, 5 and 12 spells out letters that could point to Penny's nickname for her mech. Spider-Ham's home universe of anthropomorphic animals is designated Earth-8311 because Spider-Ham first debuted in the 11th month of 1983, or 83-11. Finally, Spider-Man Noir hails from Earth-90214, a reference to the zip code 90210, which is believed to nod to the show Beverly Hills 90210, since actor Christopher Daniel Barnes, who starred on that show, was the first actor to voice Spider-Man Noir in the video game Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, the game that inspired the concept of the Spider-Verse. Barnes's other claim to fame is voicing the iconic 1990s animated Spider-Man.

Never Leave the Super-Collider Door Open

This leads to the final and most important rule of the Spider-Verse: do not leave your super collider door to the multiverse open like Kingpin did during his experimentation, because that is how multiversal incursions start. That is exactly what we saw in the first film, with the five new Spider-Verses beginning to merge and converge with the 1610 universe. If the door is left open long enough, the entire space-time continuum will be destroyed.

Those are the main rules of the Spider-Verse you need to know to survive going across the Spider-Verse.

How excited are you for Across the Spider-Verse, and do you think Miles and Gwen's bracelets will hold up for their entire road trip across the multiverse?