Sadly, the spectacle of a 60-ish Nicolas Cage slugging baddies and very occasionally doing some web-slinging in a suitably moody black-and-white film noir New York was deemed superfluous by the Prime Video algorithm, depriving viewers of an expanded, globe-hopping Spider-Noir universe. As co-showrunner Oren Uziel told Variety, “There are so many L.A. noirs we could have dove into. There are European noirs we could have dove into. There are other places to go. You’re starting in 1933. Where is that heading? It’s heading toward just a most cataclysmic time — World War II. There was a lot of storytelling that could have happened there.”
Indeed, with Cage’s Ben Reilly (aka The Spider) receiving his powers thanks to a WWI mutated spider bite, the prospect of an older, grizzled, occasionally drunken Reilly returning to sock some WWII Nazis in the kisser has a certain symmetry to it. While Cage’s fractured performance as the cynical super-gumshoe is cobbled together from various American noir archetypes, it’d be cool to see him incorporate a few Continental examples like Jean Gabin or Jean Servais into the mix. And Los Angeles already has its noir bona fides to draw from, offering up a banquet of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett for Cage to feast upon.
Alas, it’s not looking good for any of that, as Uziel explains that, in the afterglow of five posthumous Emmy wins for Spider-Noir just two days after Prime Video rolled up the cancellation magazine, he hasn’t yet been in talks to shop the series anywhere else. Citing the ever-nefarious “legal complications” and so forth, Uziel did state that he and Cage have agreed that Ben Reilly’s story isn’t over. But whether another streamer bites on returning The Spider to the small screen is still very much up in the air.
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