Summary

Spider-Noir's black-and-white aesthetic enhances its noir theme.
Bringing color to Spider-Noir may appeal to a wider, younger audience.
Despite potential appeal, maintaining the black-and-white theme is crucial for showing artistic integrity.

Why in the world is Amazon Prime Video's Spider-Noir being made available to stream in color? "Noir" literally translates to "black" in French. A stroke of red or some other accents for impact would be understandable, but according to Variety, the Spider-Man show will stream in both black-and-white and color. This makes no sense.

The recently leaked teaser trailer for the show is fantastic. It presents so many reasons to be confident that the show will be tons of fun, and most of them are Nicholas Cage-related. But, still. It's a noir show, and its black-and-white color coding works perfectly as-is. There is no need to compromise a choice so intrinsic to the series' subject matter.

Spider-Noir's Leaked Teaser Was Great

Spider-Noir piggybacks off of Cage's brilliant turn as Spider-Man Noir in Into The Spider-Verse. The new detective Spider seems just as stylish as his animated counterpart, if not considerably more earnest in his tone. Unfortunately, Amazon content services have copyright claimed most of the leaked teaser footage from YouTube, and it is no longer available. But, rest assured, it was awesome. Nick Cage being underneath all that garb could help with any de-aging if necessary, especially with the black-and-white to mask any skin aberrations.

The teaser features an unfamiliar voice claiming the city needs a hero. Cage flips around bad guys like Nightcrawler in X2, followed by Cage's Thompson-toting panache, replying "I hope they find someone." The teaser works perfectly as presented, and it's confusing to consider why they would present the same slick material in a more generic technicolor version. Noir should be black and white; the color scheme is essential in establishing the genre's tone. The series' current aesthetic is almost magically effective in evoking honest-to-goodness crime in the roaring 20's atmosphere, with Spider-Man knocking heads amidst it. Why muck that up?

When it comes to gripes over a show about obscure versions of beloved superheroes, the fuss is all about artistic integrity. The studio must hold firm on Spider-Cage's monochrome nature as a show of good faith to the character's core fans and general audiences alike. Hollywood needs to understand that it's still okay to have some of that these days.

Who Is Spider-Noir, & Why Is His Color Scheme Important?

Spider-Man Noir debuted in 2009 with David Hine's Marvel Noir comic series, which featured Spidey along with other Marvel heroes such as Daredevil and Wolverine. The most enduring of all, though, was Spider-Man Noir. He was highlighted in these comics as a hero with questionable virtues, which was nodded to in the Spider-Verse films, as he claimed he sometimes "let the march burn down to [his] fingertips just to feel something, anything." Spider-Man Noir also had an odd fixation with firearms in the comics, a far cry from the arsenal choices of traditional modern Spidey.

There is one area in which Spider-Man Noir's black-and-white color palette is integral to the original character. That area is his morally gray foundation as an anti-hero with demons and a dark past. Spider-Man Noir worked in the Spider-Verse films as a fish-out-of-water character. Those films are vibrant by nature, and Spider-Man was an anomaly amidst their joyous cascade of colors. In his own show, though, any of those colors would become an anomaly — and an adversely effective one at that.

Why Is Amazon Choosing To Stream Spider-Noir In Color?

Spider-Noir star Lukas Haas talked to Comingsoon about his initial reaction to the show's original filming in black-and-white, citing its authenticity:

"Just getting to, to do that noir thing...it was very genuine film noir, the way they filmed it."

Haas spoke about the series filming on-camera in black and white. He said he would go to the monitors and mistakenly think he was looking at older footage, saying:

:We filmed it in — I think it may come out in both black and white and color, but when we filmed it, the monitors were all black and white. It looked very, very authentic."

The question remains why Amazon would find it necessary to erase the perfect grayscale flavor in Spider-Noir. If the actors themselves were impressed by the stylistic choice, which assisted in buying into that world they were creating, why wouldn't the general audience love it as well? The key word here might be 'general' when discussing the series' audiences.

Spider-Man Noir, despite its origination nearly 20 years ago, gained widespread attention only recently with Into The Spider-Verse. Even considering his crowd-pleasing inclusion in 2010's Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions video game, black-and-white Spidey didn't become a household name until his rousing appearance in the recent animated film. Despite Spider-Man Noir's shady past and gruff anti-heroism, he is still best known as an ancillary piece of a family film. Children and young adults are likely Spider-Noir's widest audience, and Amazon MGM is surely looking to appeal to the younger crowd with bright colors to draw them.

While it's understandable that Spider-Noir needs as many viewers as possible to be successful enough to warrant a long, welcomed run, it's still perplexing that Amazon would choose to obliterate the very theme of their series to do so. Regardless, as long as troubled gumshoe Spidey is still drinking egg creams and fighting Nazis, we can forgive him for his poor choices.

Rating block community and brand ratings Image