Nicolas Cage refused an AI waiver on Spider-Noir and expects to lose Amazon over it

Nicolas Cage says he refused to sign the AI waiver Amazon wanted for Spider-Noir, and he expects that refusal to end his work with the studio. Speaking on a panel at New York Comic Con, the actor called Amazon “a very AI-friendly company” and described himself as “not an AI-friendly actor,” before telling the crowd: “I’m probably not going to be working with that studio again, but that’s okay.”

For anyone who acts, sings or records a voice for a living, this is where the fight over artificial intelligence actually happens. Hollywood’s union rules require a studio to ask before it builds or reuses a digital version of a performer, which turns the question into a form that lands in front of one actor at a time. Most working actors cannot afford to leave it unsigned. Cage, a star with four decades of leading roles behind him, left it unsigned and then said so on stage.

His full remarks, as reported by Variety and Deadline, were blunt. “Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI,” Cage said. “I am not an AI-friendly actor, so it’s like, connect those dots! I’m not a member of their club.” He added that he did not sign the waiver to let the studio use AI on Spider-Noir. The investment figure is Cage’s own. Neither outlet described what the waiver would have allowed, and Amazon has not responded publicly.

Spider-Noir was Cage’s first leading role in a television series. The Marvel show, made by Amazon MGM Studios with Sony Pictures Television for Prime Video, cast him as Ben Reilly, a retired masked crime-fighter in the 1930s, a character he had already voiced in the Spider-Verse animated films. Amazon cancelled it after a single season, days before the Emmy Awards, where the show held 11 nominations, the most of any Prime Video programme this year. Variety reported that it drew 2.6 billion minutes of viewing in its first six weeks. “Connect those dots” was Cage hinting that the waiver and the cancellation are related.

The fear behind the refusal is not new. In a 2024 interview with The New Yorker, Cage described the full-body scans he had to sit for on Spider-Noir and on a film he shot afterwards. “They’re just going to steal my body and do whatever they want with it via digital AI,” he said, and asked what anyone planned to do with “my body and my face when I’m dead.” His answer to that question was short: “I don’t want you to do anything with it!”

Amazon’s own streaming service gives performers reasons to be wary. Prime Video pulled AI-generated English dubs for anime series including Banana Fish and No Game, No Life after fans and voice actors objected to how they sounded. It also removed an AI-generated recap of the first season of Fallout that placed the show’s flashbacks in the 1950s instead of 2077 and got the finale wrong.

There are limits to what this episode proves. It is one side of the story, told from a convention stage. Nobody outside Amazon knows whether the waiver covered something narrow, such as voice matching for dubbed versions, or broad rights to a digital double. Nothing published so far shows that the refusal caused the cancellation, and an expensive show can lose its second season on cost alone. The consent rule also did its job here: Cage said no, and no replica was approved. The harder test is the actor with one credit and a rent payment, facing the same form without Cage’s leverage.

Cage made the remarks on Saturday, October 10, at the Empire Stage panel in New York. Spider-Noir premiered in May and Amazon cancelled it in September. The union consent rules date from the SAG-AFTRA agreement that ended the 2023 actors’ strike, which also requires studios to say how a digital replica will be used.

Cage is currently working on the film Perish and told the same audience he will probably do a season of HBO’s True Detective, which HBO has not confirmed. What he wants next, he said, is to work with Gen Z directors such as Backrooms filmmaker Kane Parsons. “They’re doing it from scratch and by hand,” Cage said. “I want to get with that.”

Tags: Prime Video, OpenAI, amazon, Nicolas Cage, Marc Anthony, Kali Reis, Kane Parsons, Kelly Reilly, Spider-Noir, SAG-AFTRA