That's because that series, which has been in the works for about five years and had the green light for two years, will not continue. Sources say the final decision was taken a few days ago.
The project's showrunner, The Walking Dead's well-regarded Angela Kang, will remain under an umbrella deal at Amazon MGM Studios where she will work on other projects.
Amazon's tie-up with 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, will revert to main studio Sony Pictures Television, which plans to sell the series to other buyers.
The explanations for canceling the project vary. Part of the reason likely lies in the series' tortured development history.
It goes back at least to 2019 when SPT commissioned Lauren Moon to write a television film adaptation of the comic books, which follows Cindy Moon, a Korean-American woman who is bitten by the same spider that bit Peter Parker. Moon escapes her prison and searches for her missing family and is on her path to becoming the superhero known as Silk.
A year later, Sony TV began talks with Amazon for a slate of Marvel series led by Silk. The following year, 2021, Amazon Studios struck a deal with Tom Spezialy, executive producer of Watchmen (2019), to serve as showrunner for Silk, working with Moon.
Another year later, in 2022, the Spider-Man spin-off 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 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, Silk, whose greenlight depended on the script, has had at least three versions. One involved a request for Kang and her writing team to reconfigure the series so that it doesn't rely so heavily on Silk's central character, sources said.
While evaluating script material and determining a course of action, Amazon executives delayed the reopening of Silk's writing room after last fall's strike, prompting a reprimand from the WGA. According to sources, Kang's latest pitch was well received. But after deliberations over allocating resources to genre IP projects - which are inherently pricey - the decision was made to move forward with Noir, starring Cage, and shelve Silk.
For a variety of reasons, superhero films with female leads have been struggling lately, most recently Sony's Spider-Man offshoot Madame Web and Disney's The Marvels. That has extended to genre TV, with Prime Video choosing not to continue with a second season of the controversial sci-fi series The Peripheral, starring Chloë Grace Moretz.
The Prime Video follow-up from The Peripheral makers, Fallout, another big budget genre drama, is a major breakthrough and has received a quick season two renewal.
