Spider-Noir: Episode 1's Intro Feels A Lot Like A Forgotten Superhero Bomb

Contains spoilers for "Spider-Noir" Season 1, Episode 1

"Spider-Noir" opens with a visual bang. Taking a swinging tour of New York City through the eyes of Ben Reilly (movie star Nicolas Cage), audience members see Ben's memories both as the Spider and moments from his personal life as they're projected onto the windows of the building downtown. This visual callback might be just a generic nod to the world of film noir, but the outlandish style reminds audience members of an infamous big screen film noir bomb — 2008's "The Spirit."

"The Spirit" was a Frank Miller-directed action picture based on the work of Will Eisner. It transformed golden-age comics cop Denny Colt (Gabriel Macht) into a tough-talking, bare-knuckled brawler who loves his city in a nearly biblical sense as he moonlights as the mask-sporting and suit-wearing vigilante The Spirit. Though the flick was star-studded — besides Macht, Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlett Johansson appear in this forgotten failure — the adaptation bombed at the box office. It's arguably an overhyped superhero movie that ended up being terrible, so terrible it contributed to the impoverishment of its production company, Odd Lot Entertainment. 

Those visual touches appear to be intentionally done by the makers of "Spider-Noir," who have admitted that there are a whole lot of deliberate nods to old-fashioned comic books like "The Spirit" and "The Shadow" in Ben Reilly's The Spider. The same material that fueled both "Sin City" and the big screen adaptation of "The Spirit" are echoed in "Spider-Noir."

Reilly is a jaded, older man who has a lot of living under his belt already — and, though Denny is younger than Ben and a rookie in his field, he's hardly a naïf. When comparing Ben to your garden variety Peter Parker-based take on the character, showrunner Oren Uziel told Esquire, "Ben Reilly has already gone through the entire arc and has seen it all. He's over it, and trying to move past it. But his past kind of keeps coming back to haunt him." Sounds like a certain trench coat-wearing, mask-sporting fellow who loves his city — and we're not talking about The Spider this time.