The Boys Has Officially Lost Its Throne As Prime Video's Best Superhero Show

2 weeks ago 23

Published May 30, 2026, 2:01 PM EDT

Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.

Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Boys’ ending.

But as it moved past its third season, and Amazon seemed to be stalling the big narrative payoffs to stretch out their flagship show for another couple of years, The Boys started falling into all the same traps as Marvel and DC. It started setting up spinoffs to expand the universe. Power scaling went out the window to serve a plot that wasn’t ready to end. It spent far too much time on uninteresting new characters like Tek Knight and Mister Marathon, and not nearly enough time on the titular Boys themselves.

A couple of weeks ago, The Boys concluded its fifth and final season with a highly anticipated series finale. Besides the gruesome satisfaction of watching Billy Butcher beat a depowered Homelander to death, that finale didn’t do much to improve the show’s reputation and win back some of its squandered goodwill. The Boys ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

But, fortunately, Prime has already bounced back with the best new superhero show to come along in a while. The Boys may have underwhelmed superhero fans with its ending, but Spider-Noir has blown superhero fans away with its brilliant debut season. Much like The Boys, it’s a satirical subversion of the superhero genre — but unlike The Boys, its storytelling is sharp, focused, and emotionally engaging to the very end.

Spider-Noir Has Blown The Boys' Final Season Out Of The Water

Ben Reilly crouching in front of a stained glasse window in Spider-Noir

After the frustratingly slow weekly rollout of The Boys’ eight-episode final season, Prime Video has dropped the eight-episode first season of Spider-Noir all in one go. Nicolas Cage reprises his role as the 1930s private eye-style Spider-Man he voiced in Into the Spider-Verse, this time in live-action. Spider-Noir follows Ben Reilly’s latest investigation in a crime-ridden New York City, as the emergence of supervillains forces him to reluctantly resume his webslinging vigilante career as “The Spider.”

Spider-Noir may only have one season so far — and, to The Boys’ credit, it also had an awesome first season — but it’s just so damn good. The filmmakers perfectly recreate the shadowy, high-contrast aesthetic of the film noir genre (cigarette smoke filling the air; a whiskey tumbler on every table), both in authentic black-and-white and in true-hue color, and Cage gives an incredible performance in the lead role.

Cage starts off emulating the classic noir performances of James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson, but it quickly morphs into something else entirely. He leans into the body horror of his spider-powers; Ben’s initial transformation into The Spider might be the Cage-iest thing I’ve ever seen Cage do on-screen. This eight-episode run gave Cage more of a chance to dig into one of his oddball characters than a movie would normally allow, and he goes through the full spectrum of Cage: the misery of Leaving Las Vegas, the badassery of Con Air, the downtroddenness of Adaptation, the gonzo eccentricity of Mandy.

Plus, if we want to get technical, Spider-Noir is an official Marvel character, so this is a superhero superhero, not a parody. The Boys was an independent satire of the mainline comic book universes, but Spider-Noir is the real deal. It’s not an especially important distinction, but it does make Spider-Noir a more than worthy successor to The Boys as Amazon’s new flagship superhero show.