Thanks to the new trailer for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we got to see our first glimpse of Miguel O’Hara in action! And, well, we still don’t know that much about him other than it seems like he’s ready to fight Miles Morales right out the gate.
Miguel O’Hara, also known as Spider-Man 2099, is coming to us in Across the Spider-Verse: Part One—with Oscar Isaac bringing him to life. But who exactly is Miguel?
Well, to start with, he’s Spider-Man so he possesses the same powers as the “original,” but he got his through an experimental procedure. He’s incredibly sarcastic and doesn’t really have a sense of humor. He’s so focused on what’s going on around him that he puts his energy there—which is different from the characters who have taken on the mantle of Spider-Man in the past. Peter loves to make a joke, Miles is charismatic and funny, Gwen has a bit of a sarcastic side to her as well, and all of them together (as we saw in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) results in a lot of one-liners and a bunch of self-deprecating humor. What we know about Miguel in Across the Spider-Verse is, well, he’s not boring but he’s also not one to make a wisecrack.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller talked a bit about what brought Isaac into the project in the first place and the one “condition” he had taking it. “Oscar had one condition of taking the gig: ‘Don’t make me boring.’ He’s made a really complex character out of Miguel O’Hara, and he’s definitely not boring.”
Isaac also spoke with Screen Rant about the character (now that they’ve finished the movie) and what we can expect out of his Miguel O’Hara.
“It’s been really fun working on that with [producers] Phil Lord and Kemp Powers,” he said. “The thing I can say is, what makes this character so funny is that he’s the one Spider-Man that doesn’t have a sense of humor. Because all of them act like—they’re like wisecracks, right? Everybody wisecracks, except this guy just doesn’t. He’s a very serious Spider-Man.”
What we know about Spider-Man 2099
Focusing completely on what we know from the world of Spider-Verse, we know that Miguel is aware of the Super Collider that Wilson Fisk created, and knows that it brought certain versions of Spider-People into Miles Morales’ universe.
Talking with his AI Lyla at the end of Into the Spider-Verse, Miguel is asking questions about what happened in that universe, and we see him trying to capture Miles when he’s falling through different universes in the trailers for Across the Spider-Verse. And we know that he does get into a fight with Miles in the full trailer for the film.
Outside of that, we don’t know him all that much. In the comics, he’s also a successor of Peter Parker’s Spider-Man (much like Miles Morales is) and had quite a different origin story to becoming Spider-Man. The comics tell a story of Miguel working for a company called Alchemax and O’Hara being drugged and transformed into a different version of Spider-Man.
Whether or not we’ll get into that in Across the Spider-Verse, I don’t know. But we did get a brief understanding of the other Spider-People with Into the Spider-Verse so it is a possibility. Until we know more, we just get to excitedly wait for Miguel O’Hara to come our way!
(featured image: Marvel Entertainment)
