When Spider-Man Noir first appeared in 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse, he was little more than a gimmick. The noir variant of Spider-Man, voiced by Nicolas Cage, was a hardboiled private eye who, in his words, likes “to drink egg creams, and to fight Nazis. A lot.” He hailed from a black-and-white world modeled after the film noir, the stylish crime genre populated by morally gray heroes and alluring femme fatales. He sometimes let matches burn down to his fingertips just to feel something. His dark trenchcoat was perpetually flapping in the wind, and the wind…smelled like rain.
That’s it — that’s all Spider-Man Noir really was: a collection of stereotypes about noir protagonists that was played for laughs, especially when this grim Spider-variant became enchanted by the Rubik's Cube. Even in the 2009 comic in which Spider-Man Noir was introduced, the premise is mostly a fun novelty, eventually running its course after 14 issues. So could a live-action TV show about Spider-Man Noir work? Would they even have enough material? Thankfully, the answer given by Spider-Noir, Prime Video’s new superhero show, is a full-throated yes.
