Spider-Noir

The first trailer for Spider-Noir dropped last week in two versions—"Authentic Black & White" and "True-Hue Full Color". The visual gimmick is eye-catching, but it's the sound that lands the sale of this mid-century reimagining of the wall-crawler.

Back in 2018, Nicolas Cage voiced a scene-stealing Spider-Man Noir in Into the Spider-Verse, leading to this once-unlikely spinoff. Here, Cage returns to the character in live action as Ben Reilly—a washed-up private investigator and reluctant former superhero simply known as The Spider.

The series has enlisted Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons to compose the score. Bowers, a Juilliard-trained jazz pianist whose credits include Green Book, Bridgerton, and The Wild Robot, is equally adept in jazz idioms as he is in orchestral scoring—a natural fit for fusing film noir with modern superhero sensibilities. Fans of Into the Spider-Verse will remember that Spider-Man Noir was specifically scored with classic film-noir jazz, a musical shorthand for the character's shadowy world. It's curious, then, that here Bowers and Parsons' jazz work appears to be largely kept under wraps in favour of a more energetic score emblematic of modern action-trailer music.

What we get instead is a soundscape built on tension between the industrial and the playful—between the grit of 1940s New York and the cartoonishness of a character who began life as an animated figure. The trailer opens with ambient, foreboding tones as we hear Ben in conversation with someone. At 0:17 he notes "the ticks" as a symptom of his newly acquired spider powers, and not a moment after a ticking sound in the score, a sly bit of diegetic bleed. A crawling synth enters with industrial accents, briefly discarded for tinnitus at 0:36 paired with a close-up of Ben tending to his neck, before a rapid-fire synth overtakes along with a montage that includes a blink-and-you-miss-it glimpse of body horror at 0:41.

That tension between worlds runs through the trailer's sound design. A flashback to a bar fight at 0:48 syncs its hits to the physical blows, a well-worn technique that here underscores Cage's world-weary performance by contrasting it with sudden bursts of kinetic energy. Then come the title cards: "With no power / comes no responsibility": they deadpan, set against a full-tilt score—a comedic inversion that lands precisely because the music refuses to share the joke.

At 1:02, as Ben lifts his camera, the whine of an old-school xenon flash is tucked into the broader musical soundscape—playful and almost cartoonish nodding to Spider-Noir's origins in animation. At 1:22, a split-second telephone visual carries its 20th-century ringtone into the score before the music pauses to highlight the spectacle of the animated Spider-Noir swinging through the city.

The decision to release the trailer—and indeed the series itself—in both black-and-white and colour is an unusual (and perhaps appropriately) gimmicky move, but it's sonically telling too: the soundtrack doesn't change between versions.

Strip the colour, and nothing changes sonically. In the black-and-white frame, every music cue and cut to silence carries equal import—there's no colour grading to set mood, no visual spectacle to lean on. The sound has to carry it.

Spider-Noir premieres on Amazon Prime Video on May 27th.

— Curtis Perry