Spider-Noir is the most acclaimed and successful live-action Spider-Man TV show ever, so fans should feel pretty secure in their hopes for Season 2. Nic Cage’s Ben Reilly got back in his superhero groove as “The Spider,” saving the city from violent gangster, Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), and his gang of superpowered “freaks,” Sandman (Jack Huston), Tombstone (Abraham Popoola), and Megawatt (Andrew Lewis).
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One of the biggest attractions to Spider-Noir was seeing how those classic Spider-Man villains got re-imagined for The Spider’s Noir-influenced world. Naturally, there are a lot of Spider-Man villains still on the table waiting to be adapted for Spider-Noir Season 2, but what combination of foes makes the most sense?
Here are 5 Spider-Man villains we think would be great for Spider-Noir Season 2, including the breakdown of why they would fit the season so well.
5. The Lizard
Dr. Curtis “Curt” Connors is a tragic story of someone trying to do good, only to end up in a personal Hell. After losing an arm while serving as a combat medic, Connors dedicated his scientific studies to discovering a method of regrowing limbs of the human body. He tried an experimental serum on himself, but the reptilian DNA in it instead transformed him into a human/lizard hybrid.
Film Noir was popular in the 1930s and 1940s, but the latter decade also saw another sub-genre become popular in cinema: sci-fi/horror creature features, including the entire Universal Monsters franchise and RKO Pictures era. For Spider-Noir Season 2, we’re going with a theme of adding odes to creature feature classics to the Film Noir style of the show. And Spider-Man’s best creature feature story is The Lizard. The WWI backstory for Ben Reilly and his spider-powers is a perfect runway for The Lizard’s origin story. The villain also brings the right mix of sci-fi and horror that could be adapted into the style of classic 1940s creature features.
4. Tarantula
Tarantula is a lower-tier Spider-Man villain whose mantle has been held by at least six characters in the comics. However, the common denominator between them is that the character is most often a spider-themed mercenary or assassin. The first two versions of the character, Anton Miguel Rodriguez and Luis Alvarez, both had major South American political themes, regarding revolutionary groups, oppressive governments, and terrorism. They also had colorful costumes with Spider-themed weapons, making them great opponents for Spider-Man.
Spider-Noir Season 2 could use a shady assassin working for the big bad, as killers and hitmen were often part of that dark, seedy world. The backstory of how Ben Reilly got his powers (bitten by a POW ‘Man-Spider’ creature in a lab) also opens the door for Tarantula ot have spider-powers, either from that same experiment or other government recreations of it. Tarantula is about to become a lot more famous after making a cameo appearance in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Spider-Noir could be the first project to really explore the character deeper, while putting its own stamp on him. An assassin with a deadly “spider bite” as his killing signature would be cool.
3. The Rhino
Spider-Man movies have tried to adapt The Rhino into live-action twice (The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Kraven the Hunter), and neither time was successful. However, Spider-Noir has the perfect kind of unserious energy to make the Rhino not only work, but work well.
The show would be free to re-interpret the villain in a new way, perhaps going a similar route to its versions of Sandman and Tombstone – i.e., a Russian gangster with super strength, harder skin and denser bones, able to ram into (or through) things with great force. A few sci-fi references to Rhinoceros DNA, and we’re all set – heck, give Paul Giamatti another chance, if you want! Seeing him and Nic Cage hamming it up onscreen together would be a bona fide television event.
2. Doctor Octopus
Let’s see “Doctor Octopus” live up to his name! A 1940s creature feature take on Doc Ock would be a fun reinvention of the villain that could fit nicely into Spider-Noir Season 2. Otto Octavius could be the classic mad scientist (orchestrating the creation of “creatures” like Lizard and Rhino), who ultimately reveals that he’s a creature himself, with four actual tentacles.
An old-school ’40s gangster movie “shootout” between The Spider’s organic web-shooters and Doc Ock’s squid ink shots would be sublime, especially in black and white format. Otto Octavius is also a great evil partner to another Spider-Man villain that would fit this Spider-Noir universe.
1. The Jackal
If we’re making the jump from “freaks” to “creatures” in Spider-Noir Season 2, then there is no other big bad for the season we’d rather see than Professor Miles Warren, aka, The Jackal, a character who has never been adapted into live-action before. Prof. Warren was a brilliant but completely twisted scientist specializing in genetics and biochemistry. He went insane when the focus of his obsession, Spider-Man’s girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, was killed by the Green Goblin. Warren created an alter-ego, The Jackal, and goes about a mission to ruin Spider-Man’s life, before ending it.
Warren is most famous for being the one who successfully cloned Peter Parker, creating “Ben Reilly,” as well as later creating an entire line of Spider-Man clones, like Kaine, and the “chimera” clone of Spider-Girl, Gwen Warren. In the Spider-Noir continuity, Jackal would be the mastermind villain behind Octavius and creating the “creatures” that terrorize the city, while “Miles Warren” could initially appear as an ally, helping Ben Reilly figure out more about his powers and the nature of his mutation. Like in later comics, Warren could also reveal a creature side, where he “werewolfs” into an actual human-Jackal hybrid.
Best of all, The Jackal would set up an epic Spider-Noir Season 2 post-credits scene, revealing Ben Reilly’s “Scarlet Spider” clone. Cage playing two roles in Season 3? Who wouldn’t love it?
Spider-Noir is streaming on Prime Video.
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Forum Conversation: Is the future of Spider-Man…Noir?
Go to ForumNoir absolutely rules because it’s such a fun universe with fun characters and episodes. But it’s also so self-contained that I don’t see any need for a potential continuation. But it does lend the idea to potentially getting more multiverse releases of its kind, and it’s wild that we haven’t really had any of that during the “Multiverse Saga”
Sets up a universe with certain aesthetics and rules sticks to those like glue and In doing so has kind of rekindled interest in a classic noir.
As we’ve seen in both Marvel and DC comics, alt universe flips on familiar characters are doing well right now and this is exactly that as a TV show.
There are two very important lessons, here: first, a Spider-Man TV universe is very possible if you pick the right characters and concepts. Two: we should absolutely be getting an absolute Batman TV series or anime.
It’s official that Spider-Noir is pulling some serious numbers in terms of reviews and viewership, which is easy to chalk up to the series’ originality (and Nic Cage letting his freak flag fly). What do you think sets Spider-Noir apart from all the other iterations of the hero that we’ve seen so far? Do you think that shows like this are the future of the genre? I’d love to see some more out-of-the-ordinary stuff like this take center stage.