The New Spider-Man Live-Action Shows Are Shutting Down
Amazon's Spider-Man shows, Silk and Spider-Man Noir, have paused production due to the writers strike.
Amazon’s Spider-Man spinoff shows are in a sticky situation. As detailed by The Hollywood Reporter, Silk: Spider Society and the untitled Spider-Man Noir series have both been sidelined by the Writers Guild of America strike. The live-action series were announced to be in development at Amazon last fall.
Silk and the Spider-Man Noir shows are collaborations with Sony Pictures, who control film and TV rights for Spider-Man and affiliated characters. The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang is in charge of the writer’s room for Silk. The series is executive produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the producing duo behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
While Lord and Miller are hard at work putting the finishing touches on Across the Spider-Verse, Angela Kang and the rest of the Silk team have put their pencils down. The ongoing WGA strike has forced numerous shows to skid to a halt, and not even Spider-Man shows can evade the work stoppage. A timeline for Silk had not yet been released, but whatever the plan was, it is likely to shift back considerably.
Silk is based on the comic book character of the same name. Silk is the alias of Cindy Moon, a young Korean-American woman with the abilities of Spider-Man. In the comics, she battles her way from imprisonment to find her missing family, all while honing her powers and finding her superhero identity.
Little else is known about Silk, and even less is known about the Spider-Man Noir series. But if these new Spider-Man shows are anything like Lord and Miller’s Spider-Verse films, then audiences are in for a treat.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was released to rave responses in 2018 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Film just a few months after. Its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, will continue the story of Miles Morales as he confronts the fan-favorite Spider-Man 2099 in a universe-hopping adventure.
The success of Into the Spider-Verse has a lot to do with Lord and Miller’s passion for detail. The pair have a magic touch, bringing unexpected greatness to seemingly silly concepts. They will attempt to do for the Spider-Man spin-off shows what they did for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, and The Lego Movie.
Whether they are writing, directing, producing, or doing some combination, Lord and Miller bring energy and irreverence to everything they touch. With the insanity, they also bring heart, and to them, that is the key to making things like obscure Spider-Man spin-off shows work.
It is also the approach they bring to even their raunchiest projects, like this summer’s Strays. “We used to worry that we were being soft. And now I see it as quite radical to try to represent relationships that work,” Lord said. “…[I]t’s not spectacular to watch people argue. That’s something we all experience all the time. What’s spectacular is watching people get along.”
That is certainly true in Into the Spider-Verse, and it will be interesting to see how that mantra translates to the Spider-Man shows on Amazon. In addition to those shows, Lord and Miller are also producing Beyond the Spider-Verse, the conclusion to the animated Miles Morales saga.
The pair is also bringing back Clone High, a series they started on MTV in the early 2000s. The new season of the animated show is releasing its second season weekly on Max. Lord and Miller are busy, and though progress on Silk and the Spider-Man Noir project has stopped for now, the new Spider-Man shows will spin back up before you can say THWIP!
