Prime Video declined to renew Spider-Noir for a second season, ending Nicolas Cage’s run as Ben Reilly after a single eight-episode run that pulled 851 million viewing minutes in its first week, landed at No. 2 on Nielsen’s US Top 10 for original series, and walked into this year’s Creative Arts Emmys with 11 nominations, more than any other Prime Video show. It then won five of those Emmys days after the cancellation was announced. The reason for the axing comes down to money: reports put the season’s cost as high as $400 to $460 million across eight episodes, driven partly by Amazon and Sony filming the entire season twice, once in color and once in true black-and-white, to give viewers the choice of either version.
Fans went straight to the obvious comparison. One Reddit user summed up the reaction: “They can’t justify giving this another season, but Rings of Power gets to have that insane budget of theirs?” Another was blunter: “The people upstairs are too greedy and are short-sighted.” A ResetEra commenter framed it as the platform’s actual pattern rather than a one-off: “It doesn’t end on a cliffhanger. Lame for Amazon to do this, but hey here’s Rings of Power season 7, byee.”
The math behind that frustration checks out. Amazon reportedly spent roughly $250 million just acquiring the television rights to The Lord of the Rings before a single episode of The Rings of Power was produced, and the show has run well over $100 million per season since, all while shedding a substantial chunk of the audience that tuned in for its debut. Spider-Noir, by contrast, got cancelled after one season despite growing audience goodwill, strong reviews, and an awards haul most freshman shows never get near. As Geeks + Gamers put it, “being expensive isn’t necessarily a death sentence at Prime Video. Being expensive without being The Lord of the Rings might be.”
There’s a silver lining buried in the cancellation that’s softened the blow for some fans. Spider-Noir’s first season was largely built as a self-contained story rather than a cliffhanger engineered purely to sell a renewal, so the ending holds up on its own even without a follow-up. As one viewer put it: “Makes me really glad it just focused on telling a complete story without any cliffhangers because while I’m disappointed I think it ended in a place where I’m satisfied.” That’s a genuinely rare outcome for a cancelled prestige show, even if it doesn’t answer the larger question fans keep asking: what exactly does a series have to accomplish at Amazon to earn a second season, if 851 million minutes and 11 Emmy nominations in year one wasn’t enough?
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That’s the problem. Unlike Spider-Noir, Amazon put way too much investment into The Rings Of Power. You can thank Jennifer Salke for that.
Stresses the importance of building your own platforms.