Spider-Noir: When Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man Develops a Drinking Problem and a Fedora (trailer).

There are many versions of Spider-Man. There is the quippy teen. The tortured graduate. The multiversal meme-generator. And now, courtesy of Amazon Prime Video and friends, we have the one who looks like he’s just been evicted from a Raymond Chandler novel and hasn’t quite forgiven the universe for it.

Enter Spider-Noir, a series that asks the bold question: what if Spider-Man swapped web fluid for whisky, New York skyscrapers for shadow-drenched alleyways, and existential angst for… more existential angst, but in a nicer coat?

At the centre of this gloom parade is Nicolas Cage, who appears to have been genetically engineered in a lab specifically for this role. His take on Ben Reilly, aka “The Spider,” is described as 70 percent Humphrey Bogart and 30 percent Bugs Bunny, which sounds like a fever dream but somehow works. Cage growls, mutters, and probably interrogates a hat rack at some point, all while looking like he hasn’t slept since 1934.

The premise is deliciously pulpy. Reilly is an ageing private investigator in a 1930s New York that exists somewhere between history, comic book panels, and the inside of a cigarette advert. Once upon a time, he was the city’s only superhero. Now he’s mostly just the bloke in the office nobody pays on time. But when a case strolls in that smells of conspiracy, danger, and expensive lighting, he’s dragged back into the web-slinging business.

Naturally, no noir story is complete without a cast of morally ambiguous charmers. There’s a journalist chasing headlines like they owe him money, a nightclub singer who probably knows far more than is healthy, and a collection of villains who sound like they’ve escaped from a gangster’s Christmas party. Brendan Gleeson’s mob boss, Silvermane, looms particularly large, radiating the sort of calm menace that suggests he’s already planned your funeral and is just waiting for you to catch up.

Visually, the show is doing something rather clever. It’s being released in both black-and-white and a lurid, “True-Hue” colour version. One promises all the smoky gravitas of classic noir cinema, the other looks like someone spilled Technicolor all over Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Either way, it’s a rare treat to have a series that actively encourages you to watch it twice, like a cinematic déjà vu with better hats.

And then there’s the tone. The tagline, “With no power comes no responsibility,” cheerfully flips Spider-Man’s most famous moral mantra on its head. This is not a hero swinging through the skyline cracking jokes. This is a man who has already had his grand moral reckoning and filed it under “regrets.” The result feels less like a superhero show and more like a detective story that accidentally wandered into a radioactive spider incident and never quite recovered.

Of course, here at SFcrowsnest, we have a soft spot for anything that blends genres with reckless enthusiasm, and Spider-Noir is doing so with the confidence of a man lighting a match in a room full of dynamite. Superheroes meet noir, pulp meets prestige TV, and somewhere in the middle, Nicolas Cage is muttering about destiny while punching a thug through a conveniently placed shadow.

Will it work? Possibly. Will it be strange? Almost certainly. Will it give us a Spider-Man who looks like he’s about to narrate his own downfall in voiceover while it rains dramatically outside? Absolutely.

And honestly, that alone might be worth the price of admission.