Spider-Noir was born directly out of the creative partnership that produced the original Oscar-winning Spider-Verse films, with producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller shepherding Nicolas Cage back to a character he first voiced in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. This time, however, the project is fully live-action, transplanting a radically reconceived version of the hero into a Depression-era New York City drenched in 1930s grime. Crucially, this series does not follow Peter Parker but rather Ben Reilly (Cage), a jaded private investigator haunted by a past life fighting crime as his city’s only superhero. The eight-episode production surrounds Cage with a formidable ensemble that includes Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson), Sandman (Jack Huston), and Tombstone (Abraham Popoola), delivering a collection of familiar villains radically reimagined through a hardboiled noir lens. Now, a new trailer for the series confirms Ben Reilly has a fan-favorite power.
Videos by ComicBook.com
The latest Spider-Noir trailer makes it unmistakably clear that Ben Reilly’s webs are biological in the series. A close-up of his bare fist launching a strand of web confirms the character possesses organic webbing, producing it directly from his own body rather than relying on any engineered device. That means Cage’s Ben Reilly will be the first live-action incarnation of a Spider-person confirmed to possess organic webs since Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker, who made his last appearance in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021.
Spider-Man’s Organic Webs Are on the Rise Once Again
The decision to give Ben Reilly organic webbing flows could lead Spider-Noir to explore Spider-Man lore that has largely gone untapped in adaptations. In Marvel Comics lore, Ben Reilly most famously operated as the Scarlet Spider, a genetic duplicate of Parker entangled in one of the most sprawling storylines in the character’s publishing history. Spider-Noir has not yet confirmed a clone storyline outright, but casting a character whose name alone is synonymous with that mythology signals a far more layered conception of identity than a standard origin story allows. Organic webs, in that context, could help differentiate Ben Riley from the regular Peter Parker personas, who are mostly seen using engineered webbing in the Spider-Verse movies.
The organic webbing in Spider-Noir could also be part of a larger brand synergy movement. The March trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which is also co-developed by Sony, teased that Tom Holland’s Peter Parker is developing organic webs. The footage shows Parker emerging from a web cocoon, a transformation Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) warns could be “enormously dangerous,” drawing from the “Man-Spider” and “The Other” comic storylines in which a biological mutation pushes Parker closer to his arachnid origins than his human ones. If the organic webbing does emerge in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, both major Spider-Man properties launching in 2026 will be using the concept of a Spider-person whose powers are rooted in biology rather than engineering. For Sony specifically, that convergence connects the brooding 1930s world of Spider-Noir to the blockbuster spectacle of Brand New Day, underscoring the company’s control of Marvel’s most famous hero.
Spider-Noir premieres on MGM+ on May 25th, with all eight episodes dropping globally on Prime Video on May 27th.
Are you excited to see organic webs make their live-action return in Spider-Noir? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
Most Viewed
-
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation / McDonald's -
Image Courtesy of Lucasfilm -
Image Courtesy of Marvel Comics
