Fans of superheroes whose powers tie back to arachnids are going to have a great year, with two upcoming Marvel movies set to bring Spider-Man out to play, and that's not all. While Brand New Day aims to be different from the previous Tom Holland-starring MCU films, Prime Video's Spider-Noir sounds like a live-action Spidey adventure different from anything we've seen before. And it's somehow also unlike anything star Nicolas Cage has done before.
A sizeable smattering of new Spider-Noir details and images finally surfaced, indicating the new show is hitting the 2026 TV schedule sooner rather than later. My excitement for the show has been at peak-level for a while, but while that was based largely on my own imagined ideals before, now I have actual reasons! After so many years of live-action Peter Parker stories, this Spider-Verse spinoff aleady feels like a standout treat.
Nicolas Cage Goes All In On The Noir Aesthetic, Down To His Hero Name
The comic book character Ben Reilly was first introduced as a Peter Parker clone, but it sounds like the origin story will go a little differently for Nicolas Cage's iteration, whose hero moniker is The Spider, similar to other plainly named golden-age heroes such as The Shadow and The Phantom. He's a private eye, and as executive producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller put it to Esquire, he's closer to the end of his rope than the beginning, and isn't the dashing P.I. that the noir genre often brings to mind.
As far as his performance goes, Cage described it in possibly the least predictable way one could describe playing any version of Spider-Man:
70 percent Humphrey Bogart, and 30 percent Bugs Bunny.
Nicolas Cage
I’m pretty confident that everyone else reading this can also more easily envision Cage as Bugs Bunny rather than Humphrey Bogart. He definitely has the same deep eyes and command of a scene as Bogey, but so many of his roles slot more with Looney Tunes than Casablanca. But that balance sounds peachy keen to me, schweetheart.
Phil Lord described Cage's approach in a way that, I kid you not, sounds even more unpredictable and singular than the Bogey Bunny description. As he put it:
Nic brought all of this thinking to the character that really surprised us and was kind of a headslapper. His take on it was like, ‘I'm a spider trying to cosplay as a human.’ He's code-switching. Inside his body, he feels like an animal.
Phil Lord
Just in case anyone expected to see Nic Cage in this show, we'll actually be getting a spider presenting as the Oscar winner, who is then portraying a character himself. The layers on this thing go all the way to the top, man!
Speaking to his current lot in life, Lord and Miller namecheck the all-timer classic Chinatown as an example of where Ben's career might have been many years prior, saying:
- MILLER: This character's very different from the Peter Parker from the movies. He's older and jaded, and not afraid to punch a guy in the face drunkenly.
- LORD: He already had his Chinatown disillusionment moment that happened years and years ago.
For all that I could just watch Cage populating a P.I. office without any plotting, showrunner Oren Uziel shares how Ben's story will butt up against that of Spider-Noir's central villain, as portrayed by the always amazing Brendan Gleeson. As he put it:
In all the great detective stories, you have two cases that sort of come together and you realise you're actually working the same thing. He’s a guy getting dragged into a much larger fight that he doesn't really want to be a part of. Silvermane is the big bad, but what's happening to Silvermane connects back to Ben's past and gets him spiraling deeper and deeper into his own origins.
Is it weird to start hoping for The Spider to run into Dick Tracy somewhere on the streets? Probably, but I'll still do it anyway.
Spider-Noir Will Stream Both In Color And Black-And-White
As if everything else wasn't enticing enough, one of the biggest draws of the show from a visual sense is the plan for Spider-Noir to stream in two different formats: a saturated full-color version and a stark black-and-white version that speaks to the films and TV shows of the era. I'm a sucker for this kind of thing, and it's apparently for nerds like me that the creative team wanted to try some things out. According to Cage, there is no preferred version, as both are excellent. In his words:
The truth is, they both work and they're beautiful for different reasons. The colour is super saturated and gorgeous. I think teenage viewers will appreciate the colour, but I also want them to have the option. If they want to experience the concept in black and white, maybe that would instill some interest in them to look at earlier movies and enjoy that as an art form as well.
If anything, I'm hoping this show sparks a full-on noir trend, both with superhero projects and other realms of fiction. We need Batman: Gotham by Gaslight in live-action for real for real.
Join me in finding out just how over the top Spider-Noir is when it drops at some point later in 2026 via Prime Video subscription.
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