Marvel Finally Went DARK With Spider-Man

 Spider-Man Had a Midlife Crisis… And It’s Incredible

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The Nicolas Cage–starring Spider-Noir isn’t just borrowing the look of old crime movies—it’s daring viewers to step into one. Airing this spring on MGM+ and streaming on Prime Video, the series will be released in two starkly different visual forms: one rendered in hard black and white, echoing the shadow-soaked crime films of the 1940s; the other drenched in hyper-saturated color, ripped straight from the pulp pages of Marvel Comics.
For this exclusive first look, Esquire is presenting both at once. This half of the story spotlights the color version and features conversations with showrunner Oren Uziel and producers Phil Lord and Chris Miller about how they stripped Spider-Man’s Marvel mythology down to its bones and rebuilt it as a bruised, hardboiled detective story set in the 1930s. The companion piece is our interview with Cage himself, where Spider-Noir emerges in luminous grayscale—grim, haunted, and unmistakably old-school.
The choice, fittingly, is left to the audience. “The truth is, they both work, and they’re beautiful for different reasons,” Cage says. “The color is super saturated and gorgeous. I think teenage viewers will appreciate that—but I want them to have the option. If black and white pulls them toward older films, toward that art form, that’s exciting to me.”

Uziel wants the show to feel like something unearthed rather than newly minted. Even the color version resists anything sleek or modern. “It looks like a black-and-white movie that’s been colorized,” he says. “That was one of our inspirations.”
But the process wasn’t nostalgic—it was surgical. The series wasn’t shot in monochrome and painted later, as early colorization once did. Instead, digital footage was split and processed into two separate visual identities. The result is a calibrated illusion: every color of the spectrum, tuned to feel like it belongs to another century.
Those choices radically alter the mood. In color, Spider-Noir flirts with the punchy, comic-strip swagger of Dick Tracy. In black and white, it sinks into the moral fog of Raymond Chandler—where heroes are compromised, cities rot from the inside, and shadows tell the truth before faces do.
The team even gave their color process a name, a Technicolor-style stamp of intent: True-Hue. “There’s even a font for it,” Lord says. “They made a little logo,” Miller adds.
But the mark that ultimately seals the deal—the one fans will be watching for in every frame—is Marvel.

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