Amazon is dropping the Marvel series Silk: Spider Society.
At the first Upfront presentation last week, Amazon announced the green light for Noir, based on the Marvel comic starring Nicolas Cage. Noir would be the second live-action Spider-Man Universe series for MGM+ and Prime Video. However, there is no mention of Silk: Spider Society from the first series.
That’s because the series, which has been in the works for about five years and greenlit for two years, will not continue. According to sources, the final decision was made a few days ago.
The project’s showrunner, The Walking Dead’s Angela Kang, remains under an umbrella deal at Amazon MGM Studios, where she is working on other projects.
Amazon is bringing together 900 Spider-Man & Co.’s live-action series based on the Sony Pictures Universe. Marvel characters will also continue to exist. The rights to the Silk character, created by Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos, return to the main studio Sony Pictures Television, which plans to sell the series to other buyers.
The reasons for canceling a project vary. Part of the reason is probably in the tortured development history of the series.
It dates back to at least 2019, when SPT commissioned Lauren Moon to write a TV movie adaptation of the comic books, which follows Cindy Moon, a Korean-American woman bitten by the same spider that bit Peter Parker. Moon escapes from his prison and searches for his missing family and is on his way to a superhero known as Silk.
A year later, Sony TV began negotiations with Amazon for a Marvel series led by Silk. The following year, 2021, Amazon Studios signed a deal with Watchmen (2019) executive producer Tom Spezialy to showrunner Silk, who will work with Moon.
A year later, in 2022, the Spider-Man spin-off series was officially revealed and Silk was ordered to MGM+ and Prime Video. Kang was a new writer, executive producer and showrunner, along with Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse duo 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, there have been at least three versions of Silk, whose green light depended on the script. One involved a request from Kang and his writing team to rework the series so that it didn’t depend so heavily on Silk’s central character, the sources said.
While evaluating script material and determining a course of action, Amazon executives delayed reopening Silk’s writing room after last fall’s strike, prompting notice from the WGA. According to sources, Kang’s latest pitch was well received. But after considering allocating resources to genre IP projects – which are inherently expensive – the decision was made to move forward with Noir, starring Cage, and the shelf with Silk.
For many reasons, superhero movies with female leads have struggled recently, most recently Sony’s Madame Web spinoff Spider-Man and Disney’s The Marvels. This has extended to genre TV, with Prime Video deciding not to renew the controversial sci-fi series The Peripheral, starring Chloë Grace Moretz, for a second season.
The Peripheral’s Prime Video follow-up, Fallout, another big-budget genre drama, is a major breakthrough and has been quickly renewed for a second season.