Cross-media recommendations across film, TV, games, books & music — picked by taste.
Spider-Noir drops Nicolas Cage's Ben Reilly into 1930s New York: an aging, down-on-his-luck private investigator forced to reckon with the double life he once lived as the city's sole superhero. The show is neo-noir through and through — morally tangled, atmospherically dark, and more interested in the burden of a past identity than in the spectacle of the costume. Fans will find natural companions in hard-boiled crime fiction, psychologically complicated investigators, and superhero stories that treat the mask as a wound rather than a gift.
Spider-Noir is an American neo-noir superhero series developed by Oren Uziel for MGM+ and Prime Video. Based on Marvel Comics featuring the character Spider-Man Noir, the series follows an aging private investigator and superhero in 1930s New York City who grapples with his past. Uziel and Steve Lightfoot serve as the showrunners of the series, which is produced by Sony Pictures Television in association with Amazon MGM Studios. It is set in an alternate universe within the Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU) franchise. Nicolas Cage stars as Ben Reilly / The Spider in his first lead role in a television series, with Lamorne Morris, Li Jun Li, Karen Rodriguez, Abraham Popoola, Jack Huston, and Brendan Gleeson also starring.
From the Wikipedia article Spider-Noir, available under CC BY-SA.
Film
Spider
A mentally disturbed man in a halfway house replays a traumatic childhood as his grip on reality erodes.
Film
Arsenic and Old Lace
Dark secrets lurking beneath a respectable domestic surface give this 1940s crime comedy its unsettling undertow.
Film
Spider-Man: Brand New Day
A Spider-Man erased from collective memory wrestles with identity and the cost of heroism nobody acknowledges.
Film
Spider-Man 2
Peter Parker burns out on the superhero life and shelves his alter ego, leaving the city to suffer the consequences.
Film
The Street with No Name
An FBI undercover agent disappears into Skid Row's criminal shadows — classic noir tradecraft in period New York.
Film
The Spider Woman
Sherlock Holmes investigates a series of mysterious suicides, tracking a female villain as cunning as Moriarty.
Game
Face Noir
A falsely accused private eye navigates corruption in a Chandler-esque world of hard-boiled intrigue.
Game
Noir Chronicles: City of Crime
A trouble-prone private eye races to protect someone close in a moody, investigation-driven noir world.
Game
Adam Wolfe
A supernatural investigator driven by his sister's mysterious disappearance works the brooding streets of San Francisco.
Game
Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions
Four parallel Spider-Man universes collide, each with its own hero — one of them the noir-dimension Spider-Man.
Game
Spider-Man: Web of Shadows
A symbiote-invaded New York forces Spider-Man into impossible moral choices with city-wide consequences.
Game
Ben 10
Ben Tennyson must single-handedly stop super villains threatening the world on a cross-country road trip gone wrong.
Book
Manhattan Mayhem
Crime fiction set across Manhattan's most iconic neighbourhoods, grounded in the city's geography and grit.
Book
Split Second
FBI agents track a serial killer whose violence ties to a notorious past, blending procedural urgency with personal stakes.
Book
Gaslight Arcanum
Sherlock Holmes and other classic detective figures navigate gaslit, uncanny mysteries in Victorian and Edwardian settings.
Book
The Cater Street Hangman
A detective and his partner investigate murders in a late-Victorian world where crime and class intertwine.
Book
Early autumn
Robert B. Parker's Spenser novel runs in the hard-boiled Chandler tradition of wisecracking, morally grounded private eyes.
Book
Face Off
Top thriller writers pit iconic detective characters against each other in a battle-of-champions anthology format.
Series
The Penguin
A small-time villain claws toward power in a broken city, driven equally by ambition and personal obligation.
Series
FBI
The New York FBI brings every resource to bear on major cases to keep the city and country safe.
Series
Ironside
A relentless, unconventional NYPD detective bends the rules to crack the city's hardest cases.
Series
The Tick
A powerless accountant uncovers a conspiracy revealing his city is secretly controlled by a super villain.
Series
Baptiste
Detective Julien Baptiste investigates to the brink of obsession — whatever the cost, whatever it takes.
Series
Spider-Man
The web-slinging superhero battles crime across New York City in animated form.
Fans of its crime-and-costume mix should try The Penguin, which similarly puts a street-level villain at the centre of a gritty urban power struggle, or The Tick for a more comedic but equally self-aware take on neighbourhood superheroes.
Face Noir is the closest match — a point-and-click private-eye thriller soaked in Chandler-esque atmosphere — while Adam Wolfe blends supernatural detective work with brooding city streets if you want a slightly stranger edge.
Early Autumn follows a wisecracking private investigator in the tradition of Chandler and MacDonald, and Gaslight Arcanum collects dark genre fiction with a Victorian-era crime flavour that shares the show's gaslit, shadow-filled mood.