Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse holds a 96% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, cementing it as one of the most critically acclaimed superhero films ever made. This exceptional rating reflects broad critical consensus that the film represents a remarkable achievement in animation, storytelling, and world-building.
- Table of Contents
- What Does a 96% Critics Score Actually Mean for Across the Spider-Verse?
- How Across the Spider-Verse Compares to Other Spider-Man Films on Rotten Tomatoes
- The Early Critical Consensus: From 97% to the Final 96%
- What the 8.7/10 Average Rating Reveals About Critical Reception
- The Limitations of Rotten Tomatoes Scores: What 96% Doesn't Tell You
- Audience vs. Critics: The Full Picture on Rotten Tomatoes
- What This Score Means for the Spider-Verse Franchise and Beyond
- Conclusion
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The score comes from hundreds of professional reviews across major publications, establishing that the film is not just another comic book adaptation but a genuine artistic accomplishment that resonated with serious film critics.
The 96% score translates to an average critic rating of 8.7 out of 10, an impressive baseline that demonstrates just how favorably the film was received across the board.
When a superhero film reaches this threshold, it’s sitting in elite company—most blockbusters struggle to achieve even a 70% critical rating, making Across the Spider-Verse’s performance a standout achievement in both the superhero genre and animation as a whole.
Table of Contents
- What Does a 96% Critics Score Actually Mean for Across the Spider-Verse?
- How Across the Spider-Verse Compares to Other Spider-Man Films on Rotten Tomatoes
- The Early Critical Consensus: From 97% to the Final 96%
- What the 8.7/10 Average Rating Reveals About Critical Reception
- The Limitations of Rotten Tomatoes Scores: What 96% Doesn’t Tell You
- Audience vs. Critics: The Full Picture on Rotten Tomatoes
- What This Score Means for the Spider-Verse Franchise and Beyond
- Conclusion
What Does a 96% Critics Score Actually Mean for Across the Spider-Verse?
A 96% rotten Tomatoes critics score indicates that 96 out of every 100 professional critics gave the film a positive review.
This is a remarkably high percentage for a major blockbuster release, especially one with the commercial expectations that come with a Spider-Man film. The metric doesn’t measure the intensity of positive reviews—a critic who rated it a 7.5/10 and one who gave it a perfect 10 both count equally toward the percentage.
What it does measure is consistency: did critics think this was a good film worth recommending? In the context of superhero films specifically, this 96% score places Across the Spider-Verse in rare air.
For comparison, acclaimed superhero films like The Dark Knight holds a 94% score, and even widely beloved entries like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse achieved 97%.
The consistency of positive reviews for Across the Spider-Verse suggests that despite being a sequel in an increasingly crowded animated superhero space, it maintained the quality and innovation that made the first film special. Critics repeatedly praised its visual ambition, narrative complexity, and emotional depth in ways that justified the high rating.
How Across the Spider-Verse Compares to Other Spider-Man Films on Rotten Tomatoes
The 96% score ranks as the second-highest in the entire Spider-Man franchise, trailing only the original Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s 97%. This one-percentage-point difference might seem small, but it’s significant in critical reception terms—it suggests that Across the Spider-Verse met nearly all of the expectations that the acclaimed original established.
The first film was genuinely groundbreaking; the sequel faced the challenge of delivering innovation and emotional payoff while existing in the shadow of that achievement. The nearly identical critical score indicates that Sony and the filmmaking team succeeded in meeting this daunting expectation.
By contrast, other Spider-Man films tell a different story. The live-action Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy averaged around 73-89% depending on the entry. The Amazing Spider-Man films scored lower, in the 58-66% range.
Even Tom Holland’s MCU Spider-Man films, while commercially massive, scored lower than the animated Spider-Verse films—Spider-Man: Homecoming holds 73%, and Spider-Man: No Way Home achieved 90%, which is excellent but still below Across the Spider-Verse.
This comparison reveals something important: animated films aren’t inherently more or less critically favored, but the Spider-Verse films in particular have pushed boundaries in ways that critical consensus clearly recognizes and rewards.
The Early Critical Consensus: From 97% to the Final 96%
When Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse initially released, critics rushed to publish their reviews, and the early consensus was actually 97% based on the first 29 professional reviews. This slight dip to 96% came as more reviews accumulated over the following weeks and months.
The fact that the score held so steady—moving only one percentage point from early reviews to final tallies—demonstrates remarkable consistency in critical reception. This isn’t a film that initially seemed brilliant but revealed flaws upon deeper reflection, or vice versa.
The stability of the score from 97% down to 96% also reflects something about the film’s construction: it works equally well as a fresh viewing and as a film that invites repeat analysis.
Some films see their ratings shift dramatically as critics reassess them—early reviews might be caught up in spectacle, while later reflection reveals storytelling problems, or vice versa. Across the Spider-Verse avoided this volatility.
Whether critics saw it opening night or weeks later, whether they were reviewing it cold or after thinking about it extensively, the critical judgment remained overwhelmingly positive. This consistency is itself a mark of quality.
What the 8.7/10 Average Rating Reveals About Critical Reception
Beyond the percentage score, Rotten Tomatoes provides an average numerical rating, and Across the Spider-Verse’s 8.7/10 average is equally impressive. This figure is calculated from the actual numerical scores critics gave the film, weighted across multiple review sources.
An 8.7/10 average suggests that critics didn’t just rate this as “good” but as “very good to excellent” across the board. To put this in perspective, an 8.7 average means that a typical critic review of Across the Spider-Verse was substantially positive, with meaningful praise woven throughout.
This numerical average also tells us something about the distribution of reviews.
If every critic had given the film exactly 8.7, the average would be 8.7. But real reviews vary—some were a perfect 10, others perhaps 7 or 7.5.
The fact that the average landed at 8.7 while the critical percentage remained at 96% suggests a healthy mix of “very positive” and “excellent” reviews, with perhaps a scattering of reviews that were positive but slightly more measured (7.5, for instance). Most superhero blockbusters see some critics giving qualified praise or noting reservations.
The fact that Across the Spider-Verse maintained such a high average despite this natural variation is telling.
The Limitations of Rotten Tomatoes Scores: What 96% Doesn’t Tell You
While a 96% score is impressive, it’s important to understand what this metric actually measures and what it leaves out. Rotten Tomatoes uses a binary system: a review either counts as positive or negative based on the critic’s overall verdict.
This means a critic who gave the film a 6.5/10 (genuinely mixed) might still have it counted as positive, while a critic who gave it 7/10 might not, depending on the specific publication’s methodology. This system is useful for establishing general consensus, but it flattens nuance.
A 96% score doesn’t tell you whether critics thought the film was a masterpiece or simply a very solid, entertaining blockbuster.
Another important limitation: Rotten Tomatoes scores measure critical opinion from a specific pool of established critics and publications. This pool has evolved over time and isn’t representative of all film writing or all perspectives.
The publication’s practices around which reviews it includes or excludes can occasionally affect the final percentage, though the site works to maintain standards. Additionally, a 96% critics score tells you nothing about audience reception, which can differ significantly from critical reception.
Some superhero films achieve high critical scores but medium audience scores, and vice versa. Across the Spider-Verse earned both, but that distinction matters—critical acclaim doesn’t automatically translate to audience satisfaction.
Audience vs. Critics: The Full Picture on Rotten Tomatoes
While this article focuses on the critics’ 96% score, it’s worth noting that Rotten Tomatoes also tracks audience scores separately. The site distinguishes between what professional critics think and what paying audiences thought, recognizing that these two groups sometimes diverge significantly. A film can be critically acclaimed but audience-divisive, or vice versa.
In the case of Across the Spider-Verse, audience reception was similarly positive, though typically audience scores run slightly lower than critic scores across most films.
This convergence of critical and audience approval is relatively rare for blockbusters, particularly for sequels that attempt ambitious storytelling and visual innovation. The distinction matters practically if you’re deciding whether to watch the film. A 96% critics score suggests you’re getting a film that professionals in the industry believe is well-made and worthwhile.
A strong audience score adds another layer of validation: it suggests regular moviegoers also found the film satisfying. When both metrics align highly, it’s a strong indication that the film achieved something genuinely compelling rather than being a critical pet project that general audiences found inaccessible.
What This Score Means for the Spider-Verse Franchise and Beyond
The 96% score for Across the Spider-Verse sets a remarkably high bar for the franchise’s future. When a sequel scores almost identically to its acclaimed predecessor, expectations for the next installment become even more challenging.
The franchise faces the Spider-Verse variant of the “sophomore slump” problem in reverse: the first film was groundbreaking, the second proved it wasn’t a fluke, and now any future entry will be measured against two consecutive masterpieces. This is both a compliment to what filmmakers have achieved and a cautionary note about maintaining that standard.
Beyond the Spider-Verse specifically, this score contributes to an ongoing evolution in how the film industry views animated films. For decades, animation was often segregated from serious critical consideration, assumed to be primarily children’s entertainment.
The 96% rating for Across the Spider-Verse, alongside the 97% for Into the Spider-Verse, helps establish that animation deserves consideration as a serious artistic medium capable of the same critical acclaim as live-action films.
This has real implications for how studios fund and develop animated projects, and which stories get told in this format going forward.
Conclusion
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse holds a 96% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, reflecting near-universal critical acclaim for its visual innovation, narrative ambition, and emotional resonance. This score places it as the second-highest-rated film in the entire Spider-Man franchise, demonstrating that the sequel met the nearly impossible standard set by its predecessor.
The supporting 8.7/10 average rating confirms that critics didn’t just give this film a technical thumbs-up but expressed genuine enthusiasm for what it accomplished as both entertainment and art.
Understanding this score requires recognizing what it measures and what it doesn’t. A 96% rating indicates broad consensus that the film is worthwhile and well-made, but it doesn’t guarantee any individual viewer will love it the same way critics did.
The best use of this information is as a data point among many—combined with what you know about your own tastes, audience scores, and reviews that specifically discuss what you care about in film.
If you’re interested in superhero storytelling, animation, or science fiction narratives, the critical consensus suggests Across the Spider-Verse is worth your time.
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