Another casualty tonight in Sony’s years-long efforts to throw webbing at the wall and see what sticks when it comes to making Spider-Man properties that don’t have a traditional Spider-Man in them, as Deadline reports that Amazon MGM has decided not to go forward with a second season of Nicholas Cage’s Spider-Noir show.
Not, we cannot emphasize enough for the benefit of any trigger-happy PR people reading this, based on Cage’s performance in Sony’s Spider-Verse movies—where he played an entirely separate noir-themed Spider-Man character who ran around fighting crime in a hat and trenchcoat—Spider-Noir saw Cage attempt to fit a movie star mindset into a TV star mold, to often awkward results. (The fact that he was reportedly determined to play private eye Ben Reilly as a spider trying to pass himself off as a man probably didn’t help.) That being said, Spider-Noir wasn’t devoid of charms, mostly coming from Lamorne Morris, who seemed to be the only person in the show’s star-studded cast to realize a show about a 1920s Spider-Man fighting old-timey versions of villains like Sandman should be at least kind of fun.
Developed and showrun by Oren Uziel, Spider-Noir was notable for its unique presentation, allowing viewers on either Prime Video or MGM+—where its whole season was binge-dropped back in May—to watch it in either black-and-white or colorized versions. It was—your humble Newswire writer notes, having reviewed the show’s first, and now only, season—a bit less creative with many of its storytelling choices, though. The series never seemed to know whether it was joking about its characters living in a world pulled from detective novels, or something more authentic and darker; it also saddled talented performers like Li Jun Li and Brendan Gleeson with stock character types that made little use of the comic book roots they were ostensibly drawn from.
Deadline notes that the cancellation doesn’t mean Sony and Amazon are done with this partnership, which also produced a scrapped show based on Marvel character Silk, just yet: Jeff Bezos still wants those pictures of Spider-Man/people loosely affiliated with Spider-Man in a way that doesn’t intrude on Sony’s Marvel deal, and he’s not done demanding them from Sony just yet.
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