Prime Video cancels Nicolas Cage's 'Spider-Noir' after one season, a day before its Emmy nominations are decided

Prime Video and MGM+ have canceled "Spider-Noir," the Nicolas Cage-led detective drama built around Marvel's Spider-Man Noir character, after a single season, the streamer confirmed on Sept. 4. The decision lands one day before the first night of the 78th Creative Arts Emmy Awards, where the show carries 11 nominations, more than any other Prime Video series this year.

The cancellation was reported first by trade outlets and has not been accompanied by a public statement from Amazon MGM Studios or Sony Pictures Television explaining the decision. Neither company has disputed the trade reports, which cite a familiar streaming-era calculus: a show can be acclaimed by critics, honored by its industry's own awards body and still be judged too expensive to keep making.

The series starred Cage as Ben Reilly, a washed-up private investigator in 1930s New York confronting a past life as the city's costumed vigilante, alongside Lamorne Morris as newspaperman Robbie Robertson, Li Jun Li as nightclub singer Cat Hardy, and Karen Rodriguez, Abraham Popoola, Jack Huston and Brendan Gleeson in supporting roles, per the studio's own casting materials. It was Cage's first sustained lead role in a television series after a film career spanning more than four decades.

The numbers behind the decision

"Spider-Noir" debuted domestically on MGM+'s linear channel on May 25 and rolled out globally on Prime Video two days later, arriving in more than 240 countries and territories as an eight-episode binge release, according to the official premiere announcement from Amazon MGM Studios. The series, which follows an aging Ben Reilly (Cage) forced back into his old identity as a costumed vigilante in 1930s New York, was offered in two parallel cuts, a black-and-white "Authentic" version and a full-color "True-Hue" version, doubling the post-production workload on every episode.

It performed respectably by the ratings service both studios rely on to judge original programming. In its premiere week, "Spider-Noir" logged 851 million viewing minutes in the United States, finishing second among original series and fourth overall on Nielsen's weekly streaming rankings, trailing Netflix's "The Boroughs," which drew 1.74 billion minutes that same week, according to figures reported by The Hollywood Reporter. But the show fell out of the platform's daily top 10 within weeks of its premiere, a decline trade reporters have pointed to as a factor in the cancellation. Critically, the show held up: it carries a 92 percent critics' score and a 90 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and its 11 Emmy nominations span cinematography, production design, sound mixing and editing, prosthetic makeup, stunt work, and both original score and original song.

A costly bet on a black-and-white superhero

"Spider-Noir" was not an incidental title. It was the first live-action series to reach air under a multi-year deal between Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television to build shows around characters from Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters — the same corner of the Spider-Man mythology that has produced films including "Venom" and "Kraven the Hunter" but had, until this year, produced no scripted television. The series was ordered in May 2024, alongside plans for a companion project, "Silk: Spider-Society," which Sony and Amazon scrapped in development that same month, leaving "Spider-Noir" as the deal's sole survivor for two years.

At the time of the order, the companies described the project in expansive terms. "Expanding the Marvel universe with Noir is a uniquely special opportunity and we are honored to bring this series to our global Prime Video customers," Vernon Sanders, head of television for Amazon MGM Studios, said in the company's 2024 announcement of the series order.

"The extremely talented Nicolas Cage is an ideal choice for our new superhero and the accomplished producing team with Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Amy Pascal, and the incredible team at Sony is dedicated to expanding this franchise in the most authentic way."

Katherine Pope, president of Sony Pictures Television Studios, struck a similar note at the time, calling Cage's casting a chance to explore "this reimagining of such an iconic character in Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters" with what she called an ideal creative team. The show marked Cage's first regular lead role in television, produced by Lord and Miller — the Oscar-winning duo behind "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" — alongside longtime producing partner Amy Pascal, with Emmy winner Harry Bradbeer directing the first two episodes and Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot serving as co-showrunners.

Who is left holding the nominations

The cancellation falls hardest on the below-the-line crews whose work is being judged this weekend with no season to follow it. All 11 of the show's nominations are in craft categories — cinematography, sound, visual effects, prosthetics, stunts and music — rather than acting or writing, meaning the nominees are largely technicians, composers and stunt performers who built a full second season's worth of expertise in shooting the same footage twice, once in color and once in monochrome, only to learn the format will not continue. Cage, who is also credited as an executive producer, remains attached to Sony's animated Spider-Man franchise; he is set to reprise his voice role in "Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse," due in 2027, meaning his association with the noir Spider-Man character does not end with the live-action series.

For Amazon and Sony, the setback is narrower than it might appear. The companies' broader television agreement survives the cancellation, and reporting from trade outlets indicates at least one additional series drawn from Sony's Marvel characters is close to a formal series order, meaning "Spider-Noir" functions as the deal's costly first lesson rather than its ending point. For the cast and crew who spent months filming in Los Angeles, the cancellation forecloses the prospect of returning to a production that both companies had, at its outset, described as the start of a multi-season franchise rather than a one-off experiment.

What happens next

"Spider-Noir" will still be judged on its own merits this weekend. The Creative Arts Emmys are being handed out over two nights, Sept. 5 and 6, at the Peacock Theater in downtown Los Angeles, with the ceremony edited into a single broadcast airing Sept. 12 on FXX. A win in any of its 11 categories would make "Spider-Noir" one of the rare series to collect Emmy hardware after its cancellation had already been made public, a distinction that has befallen other short-lived, critically favored shows in past years but rarely one still mid-nomination when the news broke.

Beyond the ceremony, the more consequential outcome is whether Amazon MGM Studios and Sony Pictures Television proceed with the next series envisioned under their multi-title agreement, and whether its budget and format choices reflect the lesson of "Spider-Noir": that critical acclaim and awards recognition, absent sustained viewership, are no longer sufficient to keep an expensive series on a streaming service's schedule. The main Primetime Emmy Awards, which cover acting, writing and directing rather than the technical categories in which "Spider-Noir" competed, follow on Sept. 14 at the same venue, with the show absent from that ceremony's nominee list. No episodes, specials or reunion projects tied to the series are currently scheduled, and the studios have not indicated whether footage from a potential second season, had one been ordered, exists in any form.