The first season of Citadel cost $300 million and scored 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. Both of those numbers matter. The budget figure established Prime Video’s ambition. The critical reception established how badly that ambition was misfired. Reviewers consistently identified the same problem: the show spent so much energy building a universe that it forgot to give audiences characters or stories worth investing in. The spinoffs — Citadel: Honey Bunny from India, Citadel: Diana from Italy — have both been cancelled after single seasons.

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan ran for four seasons on Prime Video with diminishing returns. The third and fourth seasons traded the geopolitical complexity of the earlier episodes for tighter action plotting that felt more conventional and less distinctively Ryan-ish. John Krasinski was always a slightly counterintuitive casting choice who grew into the role, and the series ended without the kind of conclusion that closed the story permanently. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War, arriving May 20 on Prime Video, is a feature-length film rather than a new season — a format choice that signals the franchise is testing whether the character has theatrical-scale appeal or whether the streaming-series model was the right container all along.

There is a version of this show that fails spectacularly. Ghost Rider failed. The Superman Lives project never even got off the ground. Nicolas Cage has spent two decades being the punchline of every conversation about actors and comic book movies. Spider-Noir, premiering May 27 on Prime Video after a May 25 MGM+ debut, is his chance to close that file. The premise is legitimately interesting. Ben Reilly is a 1930s private investigator in Depression-era New York, aging and burned out, who once operated as the city’s only superhero.