22 Years Later, Spider-Man’s New TV Show is Ending Marvel’s Nastiest Curse

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Published Feb 22, 2026, 7:00 AM EST

Jared is a writer, editor, and Communications Studies graduate who loves popular nerd culture (almost anything to do with Marvel, DC, Star Wars, or The Lord of the Rings) and the interactive storytelling medium. Jared's first console was the PS1, wherein he fell for Spider-Man, Spyro the Dragon, and Crash Bandicoot.

Spider-Man movies, across the board, are fairly hit-or-miss. There’s at least one movie in all three live-action Spider-Man franchises that is considered that series’ dud, for instance, and there’s an argument to be made that there hasn’t been a widely celebrated and critically acclaimed Spider-Man movie that wasn’t in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Spider-Man 2 in 2004, a whopping 22 years ago.

That’s not to say that the MCU Spider-Man movies are perfect, but Sony has undeniably had a lot more Spider-Man-related misses than it has had hits concerning live-action. This curse has been further exacerbated by Sony’s most recent Spider-Man-adjacent outings that have starred villains and side characters, but Amazon Prime Video’s Spider-Noir show is finally featuring a Spider-Man as its lead and seems like it could be a surprisingly great Sony/Marvel entry based on its recent trailer.

Sony’s Spider-Man Curse Can End With Spider-Noir

Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly in a club in Spider-Noir

Spider-Noir’s astonishing true-hue and black-and-white visuals, as well as a predictably magnetic Nicolas Cage performance, are doing a lot of the show’s heavy lifting. The story and its lore are sure to be divisive, as Spider-Noir is swapping Peter Parker for Ben Reilly and isn’t related to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, whose animated Noir Spider-Man (also played by Nicolas Cage, who evidently inspired this live-action spin-off) is apparently a separate iteration.

Nonetheless, it looks tremendously fun and has a high enough production budget for fans to salivate over a four-second clip of Spider-Man web-swinging. If it can lean into those strengths and be a halfway decent Spider-Man Noir adaptation, Sony will have made a considerable comeback in the realm of live-action Spider-Man.

Spider-Noir Shoulders a Brutal Weight

Nicolas Cage as Ben Reilly on the top of the roof in Spider-Noir

This is a lot of pressure to put on a spin-off TV show. That said, Sony’s Marvel projects have earned a great deal of skepticism due to how poorly received the likes of Morbius, the Venom trilogy, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter are.

Sony somehow struck non-MCU gold with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and spinning multiple related projects out of it—Spider-Noir, as well as Spider-Gwen and Spider-Punk movies reportedly in development—was a no-brainer. Of course, virtually nobody asked for the Spider-Man villain-centric movies that Sony was unapologetically committed to, and so it’s nothing short of a miracle that Spider-Noir exists and actually looks special.