Spider-Noir! Spider-Noir! Want some new photos? Here they are! Nine months after we got our first look at Nicolas Cage’s Ben Reilly in Spider-Noir, Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot’s upcoming live-action Spider-Verse spin-off series (try saying that after a few egg creams!), today Amazon has dropped a bunch of new shots — both in colour and black-and-white — from the show. For fresh looks at Cage’s newly monikered ‘The Spider’ Ben Reilly, Lamorne Morris’ roving Daily Bugle reporter Robbie Robertson, Li Jun Li’s mysterious starlet Cat Hardy, and Karen Rodriguez as Reilly’s secretary Janet Smart, scroll on down;
Set in 1930s New York and inspired by the hugely popular Spider-Man Noir comics run, Spider-Noir — per the series’ official logline — ‘tells the story of Ben Reilly (Cage), a seasoned, down on his luck private investigator in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life, following a deeply personal tragedy, as the city’s one and only superhero.’ So far, so recognisably Spider-Man Noir. An interesting wrinkle with co-showrunners Uziel and Lightfoot’s series however is that Cage isn’t playing a Peter Parker variant this time out — or even technically Spider-Man. Here he’s Spidey clone Ben Reilly, and he goes by the distinctly noir-sounding The Spider. In an extensive new interview with Esquire, producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller explained Spider-Noir’s stepping away from the Peter Parker mantle, saying, “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. He already had his Chinatown disillusionment moment that happened years and years ago.”
Alongside Cage, Morris, Li, and Rodriguez — who viewers will be able to watch in glorious technicolour or true noir monochrome, preference depending — Spider-Noir’s impressive ensemble elsewhere includes Brendan Gleeson in a pivotal role as targeted crime boss Silvermane and, in the role of Spidey rogues’ gallery fave Flint ‘Sandman’ Marko, Jack Huston. We’ll find out how they figure into Spider-Noir’s tangled narrative web when the series hits Prime Video this Spring. Until then, we’re dusting off our trench coats and heading back to solve another Rubiks Cube in the rain!