Nicolas Cage’s Spider-Man Series Just Changed the Game for Sony’s Spider-Verse

Spider- Noir on Prime is the real deal. If you skipped it because you figured Sony had burned through all the goodwill for its live-action Spider-adjacent stuff, you missed maybe the best live-action Spider-Man TV show ever made and one of the bigger surprises in the entire Spidey ecosystem.

Yes, it really is that good

I gave the season a 4-star rating in my Spider-Noir review, and I keep rewatching it enough (there are two different versions to dig into) that I may bump that to a 4.5. Nicolas Cage goes full feral here as a grim 1930s take on the character, credited simply as 'The Spider.' It is gnarlier than the family- friendly Tom Holland flavor: harder-hitting fights, a streak of legit body horror, and a willingness to get weird without winking at you every five minutes.

The bigger takeaway, though: this is proof that Sony’s push for a more adult corner of the Spider-verse wasn’t a doomed experiment. Even better, it shows you can anchor these projects with their own Spider-Man variant and not just villains, antiheroes, or random side characters. After a run of misfires, Spider-Noir feels like the jolt this franchise badly needed.

The numbers: a hard reset for Sony’s live-action streak

Sony’s recent live-action Spider-verse movies were not critics’ darlings. You can argue the scores were harsher than they should have been, and the audience numbers (with way more votes) often paint a kinder picture. Still, the critics’ tallies are the record everyone cites, and that track record has been rough, with zero Fresh ratings and three landing below 20%.

• Venom ( 2018): 31% critics on Rotten Tomatoes
• Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021): 58% critics
• Morbius (2022): 15% critics
• Madame Web (2024): 10% critics
• Venom: The Last Dance (2024): 40% critics
• Kraven the Hunter (2024): 15% critics

Spider-Noir flips that narrative. It’s sitting at 91% with critics and is officially Certified Fresh. That’s 33 points higher than Sony’s best showing above (58% for Venom: Let There Be Carnage). Even more interesting, it avoids the critic-vs.-audience tug-of-war we’ve seen since Venom in 2018. The audience score is 92%—basically in lockstep with critics—which is exactly the kind of alignment studios dream about.

Why this works (and what it sets up)

Cage’s off-kilter lead performance, the punchier violence, and that creepy body-horror undercurrent all help, but the secret sauce is focus. This is a Spider story, not a sidecar. It has confidence in its pulpy lane, and the show doesn’t try to reverse-engineer itself into a crossover machine.

As for what comes next: Spider-Noir closes in a spot that makes a season 2 feel both easy and exciting—think a clean continuation with a fresh rogues gallery. If Sony wants a case study for how to build this line out, they just made one.

Bottom line: if you care at all about live-action comic TV, this is the one you don’t let slip past you.