Sony Animation Pictures’ Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse introduced viewers to Spider-Noir, a detective who uses his powers to investigate various underground crimes. His voice actor, Nicolas Cage, reprises his role for the Spider-Verse’s first live-action series named after the dark-and-broody hero. Marvel fans have waited for a sign of the project’s development, growing curious about how Sony will approach it outside of a theatrical release. After almost two years, the trailer was later dropped on Feb. 12.
Spider-Noir’s Series Concept
Spider-Noir was inspired by Earth-90214’s Peter Parker, who dedicated his time in the Great Depression to defending and fighting against a corrupted government after his Uncle Ben lost his life to the Goblin. The live-action series follows a different person who isn’t a Parker. Cage stars as Ben Reilly, a New York private investigator who is haunted by his past life and suffers from a tragedy.
The official Amazon Prime trailer featured Reilly in an asylum, who then wandered into a lab where scientists were experimenting with spiders. When the gumshoe gets bitten by the radioactive spider, he suffers from violent impulses. He managed to suppress them for, in his words, “Most of the time.” He becomes not the friendly-neighborhood Spider-Man, but night-crawling Spider-Noir.
How Nicolas Cage’s Insight Helped Production
The Esquire conducted an exclusive interview with Cage in his first televised role to learn his acting method for his character. He answered, “For this character is 70 percent Humphrey Bogart, and 30 percent is Bugs Bunny.” He then added, “I was basically Mel Blanc doing Bogart, with that sarcastic sense of humor. But it’s a hundred percent me.” Other inspirations the Oscar winner mentioned are Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Roy Lichtenstein.
Cage explained he helped showrunner Oren Uziel brainstorm Spider-Noir’s presentation to replicate that Great Depression aesthetic. “I was explaining what I had hoped, what my dream with this concept would be. We could take a 1930s noir film, meaning that manner of speaking, the Howard Hawks’ quick dialogue, and mash it into another icon in the Marvel realm, which would be the spider element.”
Spider-Noir Featured in Black & White and Color
According to the trailer, Spider-Noir can be watched in black-and-white and in color. Uziel and his co-producers, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, commented that the series’s colorized version will satisfy aged film enthusiasts using saturation instead of modern colors. Almost to what Fantastic Four: First Steps wanted to achieve with the 1950s look.
“It looks like a black-and-white film that’s been kind of colorized,” Uriel told Esquire in the second interview. The technique was achieved by recording the scenes in color first, splitting the process into two formats, and using grayscale dialing to mimic the film noir style. This prevented the editing artists to handpaint the frames.
Cage, who reviewed eight episodes of the show, hopes that teenagers will show appreciation for the classic black-and-white. “The truth is, they are both work and are beautiful for different reasons. […] Teenage viewers will appreciate the colors, but I want them to have the option. […] Maybe that would instill some interest in them to look at earlier movies and enjoy that as an art form as well.”
Who’s Caught in Manhattan’s Web?
Playing alongside Cage in the main cast are three award winners and two television stars. Fargo’s Lamorne Morris has the only other revealed role. The Emmy Award-winning actor will be investigative journalist Robbie Robertson. Robertson is portrayed as Reilly’s partner.
Cage and Morris are joined by Sinners’ Li-Jun Li, Boardwalk Empire’s Jack Huston, Harry Potter’s Brendan Gleeson, The Hunting Wives’ Karen Rodriguez, and Slow Horses’ Abraham Popoola. Guest stars include Lukas Haas, Cameron Britton, Cary Christopher, Michael Kostroff, Scott MacArthur, Joe Massingill, Whitney Rice, Amanda Schull, Andrew Caldwell, Amy Aquino, Andrew Robinson, and Kai Caster. Spider-Noir will premiere exclusively on Prime on May 27.
