Prime Video Canceled Spider-Noir. Two Days Later, It Won Five Emmys

Nicolas Cage's noir spin on Spider-Man pulled a 92% critics score and more Emmy nominations than any other Prime Video series this year — then got cancelled for budget reasons anyway, only to sweep five Creative Arts Emmys 48 hours later, an ending nobody in the room pretended wasn't a little embarrassing.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. · SEP 10, 2026 ~7 MIN READ

There's bad timing, and then there's whatever just happened to Spider-Noir. On September 4, Prime Video and MGM+ confirmed the noir detective drama — Nicolas Cage's first regular TV role, built around a version of Spider-Man reimagined as a washed-up 1930s private eye — wouldn't be coming back for a second season. This despite a 92% critics score and a 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and 11 Emmy nominations, more than any other Prime Video series earned this year. Two days later, at the Creative Arts Emmys on September 6, the show won five of those eleven nominations. However you slice it, that's an unusually rough couple of weeks for a television show to go through — and, as it turns out, not even the first awards recognition Spider-Noir had picked up before the cancellation news broke.

In Brief

Prime Video and MGM+ cancelled Spider-Noir, Nicolas Cage's noir reimagining of Spider-Man, on September 4 after a single eight-episode season — despite a 92% Rotten Tomatoes critics score and 11 Emmy nominations, the most of any Prime Video series this year.
Two days later, at the September 6 Creative Arts Emmys, the show picked up five wins: Outstanding Cinematography, Sound Editing, Special Visual Effects, Stunt Coordination and Main Title Design — on top of a Best Superhero Series win it had already collected weeks earlier at the Critics' Choice Super Awards.
The steep cost of shooting every episode in both color and true black-and-white appears to have weighed heavily on the decision, even as the Amazon-Sony television partnership continues, with another project already reported to be nearing a series order.

A show that did everything right except cost less

Spider-Noir told the story of Ben Reilly, a down-on-his-luck private investigator in an alternate 1930s New York who's also, reluctantly, the city's only superhero — a premise pulled from the Marvel comics' Spider-Man Noir character and given a full eight-episode, prestige-drama treatment by executive producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, alongside showrunners Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot. Cage led a cast that included Lamorne Morris as Daily Bugle photographer-turned-ally Robbie Robertson, Brendan Gleeson as crime boss Silvermane, plus Li Jun Li, Jack Huston, Abraham Popoola and Karen Rodriguez. It's worth clearing up a common mix-up here: this show has no connection to the animated Spider-Verse films, even though Cage previously voiced a different version of the Spider-Man Noir character there — Spider-Noir on Prime Video is its own, unrelated continuity built specifically for television.

The show debuted in May to a No. 2 finish on Nielsen's weekly U.S. Top 10 for original streaming series, pulling in 851 million minutes viewed in its first week alone, and it held a spot at the top of Prime Video's own internal charts for well over two months after that. None of that was a fluke of hype, either — critics gave it a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, audiences gave it 90%, and the Television Academy handed it 11 Emmy nominations, more than any other Prime Video series this year. It had already picked up an early trophy too: Spider-Noir won Best Superhero Series at the Critics' Choice Super Awards before the Emmys even happened, with Cage and Gleeson both landing individual acting nominations there as well. By any normal measure of "is this show working," Spider-Noir was working.

And yet the cancellation, confirmed by Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter on September 4, came anyway. The most likely explanation underneath it all is money: every episode of Spider-Noir was shot twice, once in full color and once in true black-and-white, an unusual and expensive production choice that gave the show its distinctive look but also meaningfully inflated its budget against viewership Deadline described as respectable rather than outsized. Streamers weigh cost against performance, not acclaim against performance, and on that math, a genuinely good show can still come up short. Cage, for his part, didn't sound blindsided or bitter about any of it. "For me, one season is perfect, having said what I wanted to say with this dangerous, innovative, pop-art Spider-Man," he told Deadline, noting the season told a largely self-contained story even though it left enough threads dangling that a second season would have made sense. The Amazon-Sony television partnership behind the show isn't ending with it, either — the two companies are reportedly developing several other projects together, with one already said to be nearing a series order.

Winning five Emmys for a show that no longer exists

Two days after the cancellation went public, Spider-Noir showed up to the Creative Arts Emmys and won five times: Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (One Hour), Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series (One Hour), Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Single Episode, Outstanding Stunt Coordination for Comedy Programming, and Outstanding Main Title Design. Five wins out of eleven nominations put it among the night's most-awarded shows — for a series that, as far as its future goes, no longer exists. Backstage, supervising stunt coordinator Freddy Bouciegues and co-winner Hugh Aodh O'Brien got asked the obvious question, whether the wins might make Prime Video reconsider, and didn't pretend the timing wasn't funny. "Tell me who to call, I'll ask them," Bouciegues said.

Nobody at Prime Video has walked back the cancellation, and there's no real indication anyone's seriously considering it — awards recognition and renewal math have always run on separate tracks, and a Creative Arts sweep, while a genuine testament to the craft work behind the show's title sequences, sound design and stunt team, isn't the kind of signal that reopens a budget conversation. It's worth noting the Creative Arts Emmys are handed out roughly a week before the marquee Primetime Emmy ceremony, honoring the technical and craft categories the main broadcast doesn't have time for — which is exactly why a cancelled show could still sweep five trophies without a single acting or writing nomination converting alongside them.

What Cage is doing next

Cage isn't sitting around waiting on the outcome, either. He's already wrapped his next Prime Video project, "Madden," a David O. Russell-directed biopic in which he plays legendary NFL broadcaster and coach John Madden opposite Christian Bale, set for a streaming-only release on November 18 with no theatrical run planned. "When you do a season of television, it's equivalent to making four movies back-to-back," Cage said of the jump from one project to the next, adding that moving straight from Spider-Noir into Madden was "a bit of a learning curve and a fast cut." For Spider-Noir, the five trophies are now the closest thing it'll get to a proper send-off — a strange, honest kind of ending for a show that turned out better than the decision made about it.

Commentary: Gustavo Henrique

Okay, I'll just say it plainly: a show can be genuinely excellent and still get cancelled, and I wish that got said more often instead of treated like some kind of mystery every time it happens. Spider-Noir had a 92 on Rotten Tomatoes, more Emmy nominations than anything else on the platform this year, a Critics' Choice trophy already in hand before the Emmys even happened, and reportedly held Prime Video's own internal top spot for two straight months. None of that is actually what a renewal decision comes down to. Streamers don't grade on quality — they grade on quality-per-dollar — and shooting every single episode twice, once in color, once in true black-and-white, is a genuinely artistic swing that was never going to look great on that particular spreadsheet, no matter how good the finished show turned out to be.

What actually gets me isn't the cancellation itself, though. It's the five Emmys landing two days later like nothing happened. Nobody in that room stood up and said "wait, maybe we got this one wrong." The stunt coordinator got asked point-blank whether the wins might change anything, and he basically laughed it off: "tell me who to call, I'll ask them." That one line kind of tells you the whole story. Everybody already knew the trophies wouldn't move the needle. What strikes me most, honestly, is how little acrimony there is anywhere in this story. Cage isn't publicly campaigning for a reversal, Amazon and Sony are reportedly already cooking up whatever comes next between them, and the show's own crew is joking about the timing instead of raging against it. That's not what cancellations usually look like. It suggests everyone involved always understood this as a show built to say one complete thing — and now it's got five trophies to prove it said that thing well.

HOW WE REPORTED THIS

Independently reported and written for this story — see our full editorial methodology for how we verify claims and separate fact from analysis.