At its first upfront presentation this week, Amazon announced a green light for Noir, based on the Marvel comic, with Nicolas Cage set to star. Noir was to be the second in a suite of live-action Spider-Man Universe series for MGM+ and Prime Video. However, there was no mention at the upfront of the first, Silk: Spider Society.
That is because that series, which had been in the works for about five years and greenlighted for two, is not moving forward. I heard the final decision was made a few days ago.
The project’s showrunner, well regarded Walking Dead alum Angela Kang, remains under an overall deal at Amazon MGM Studios where she will work on other projects. Amazon’s commitment to the suite of live-action series based on the Sony Pictures Universe of 900 Spider-Man & Co. Marvel characters also remains in place. Rights to the Silk character, created by Dan Slott and Humberto, revert back to lead studio Sony Pictures Television, which is looking to shop the series to other buyers.
Accounts of what led to the dismissal vary. Some of the reasons likely lie in the show’s tortured development history.
It goes back to at least 2019 when SPT commissioned Lauren Moon to write a TV adaptation of the comic, which follows Cindy Moon, a Korean-American woman bitten by the same spider that bit Peter Parker, as she escapes imprisonment and searches for her missing family on her way to becoming the superhero known as Silk.
A year later, Sony TV started conversations with Amazon for a suite of Marvel series, led by Silk. The following year, 2021, Amazon Studios made a deal with Watchman alum Tom Spezialy to serve as showrunner on Silk, working with Moon.
Another year later, in 2022, the suite of Spider-Man spinoff series was officially unveiled and Silk was ordered for MGM+ and Prime Video with Kang as new writer, executive producer and showrunner and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse pair Phil Lord and Chris Miller and Spider-Man franchise producer Amy Pascal as executive producers for Sony Pictures TV and Amazon MGM Studios.
Since then, Silk, whose green light was script-dependent, has gone through at least three versions, I hear. One of them involved a request for Kang and her writing team to reconfigure the show so it is not hanging so heavily on the central character of Silk, I hear.
While evaluating script material and figuring out a course of action, Amazon brass delayed the reopening of Silk‘s writers room after the strike last fall, drawing a rebuke from the WGA. According to sources, the latest pitch from Kang was well received. But after deliberations where to allocate resources on genre IP projects — which are inherently pricey — a decision was made to proceed with Noir, starring Cage, and shelve Silk.
For various reasons, superhero movies with female leads have had a tough time lately, most recently Sony’s Spider-Man offshoot Madame Web and Disney’s The Marvels. That has carried over to genre TV, with Prime Video opting not to proceed with a second season of its high-profile sci-fi series The Peripheral, headlined by Chloë Grace Moretz.
The Peripheral creators’ Prime Video followup Fallout, another big-budget genre drama, has been a big breakout, earning a quick Season 2 renewal.
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