Nicolas Cage has played a lot of things across a 40-year career. A superhero in Ghost Rider. A superhero’s father in Kick-Ass. The voice of a cartoon superhero in the Spider-Verse films. But Spider-Noir, which had its red carpet premiere in New York on Wednesday night, marks his first time leading an entire television series — and it looks like nothing else currently on streaming.
Nicolas Cage, Lamorne Morris, and Jack Huston attended the New York premiere of the new Prime Video series on Wednesday night, May 13.
The series was created by Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot, developed alongside the Spider-Verse creative team of Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, and Amy Pascal, all of whom executive produce. Cage stars as Ben Reilly, an aging, down-on-his-luck private investigator in 1930s New York City, grappling with his past life as the only superhero in the city — The Spider. The cast also includes Lamorne Morris as journalist Robbie Robertson, Li Jun Li as nightclub star Cat Hardy, Karen Rodriguez as Reilly’s sharp secretary Janet, and Brendan Gleeson.
The show’s most unusual technical element: Prime Video is releasing it in two distinct visual formats simultaneously. “Authentic Black & White” captures the gritty 1930s noir aesthetic of classic cinema, while “True-Hue Full Color” — which the production team developed a proprietary process to create — renders the same footage in super-saturated Technicolor, designed to evoke the look of vintage comic panels. “The truth is, they both work and they’re beautiful for different reasons,” Cage told Esquire.
The first two episodes were directed by Harry Bradbeer, whose previous credits include Fleabag and Killing Eve — which immediately signals the kind of tonal specificity the show is aiming for. The tagline, “With No Power, Comes No Responsibility,” is a deliberate inversion of the most famous line in Spider-Man mythology.
All eight episodes drop simultaneously on Prime Video globally on May 27, with an early domestic premiere on MGM+’s linear channel on May 25. Mark your calendar.
