Phil Lord and Chris Miller Making All-Animated Spider-Man Film

Animation’s hottest creative duo, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, will make an all-animated Spider-Man movie that is due in theaters on July 20, 2018. The surprise announcement was made tonight during the Sony presentation at CinemaCon in Las Vegas.

Lord and Miller, who most recently directed The Lego Movie, will also write and produce the film. The other producers are Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, and Amy Pascal. New Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman told the Vegas crowd that the film will be “fucking awesome.”

According to Sony:

The film will exist independently of the projects in the live-action Spider-Man universe, all of which are continuing. As previously announced, Spider-Man will next appear in a live-action Marvel film from Marvel’s Cinematic Universe (MCU). Sony Pictures will thereafter release the next installment of its $4 billion Spider-Man franchise, on July 28, 2017, a live-action film being produced by Kevin Feige at Marvel and Amy Pascal, who oversaw the franchise launch for the studio 13 years ago.

The news of Lord and Miller making a film with Sony is interesting in light of their current relationship with Warner Bros. on the Lego franchise as well as producing other animated Warner Bros. pics like Storks.

Lord and Miller previously directed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs for Sony Pictures Animation (SPA). It is unclear from the announcement whether the Spider-Man feature will be made under the SPA umbrella, though based on Lord and Miller’s feelings about how the division has been run in the past, one might guess that they won’t be too eager to engage with the division’s bureaucracy for this latest superhero venture.