The 'Silk: Spider Society' Writers Room Has Been Demolished

Everybody’s gone, Dave. Everybody’s gone.

If you have a spider-sense, it’s probably going crazy right now. Sony has been developing multiple series that would bring them back to utilizing their Spider-Man rights on television in a massive expansion. For one project, Silk: Spider Society, it seems they’ve hit a major snag: the entire writers’ room has been dismissed.

The show, which has been in development in various forms since 2020, is undergoing a creative overhaul, with only showrunner Angela Kang, producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and co-executive producers Kai Wu and Jim Barnes remaining. This comes as the writers room had been several episodes deep before the Writers Guild of America strike began. While the strike ended last September, Amazon Studios kept several shows on pause, including it, even as other series reopened their writers’ rooms and sprung back into production. By November, after the actors dove back into work with their deal secured, patience wore thin, and the writers guild warned Amazon that “their failure to recommence a number of writing rooms after the strike is a violation of the Strike Termination Agreement (STA) between the WGA and AMPTP.” The writers room was supposed to have started back up in mid-to-late January but it seems that it did not come to pass.

Silk: Spider Society is about Korean-American heroine Cindy Moon, bitten by the same spider that bit Peter Parker, who at least in this iteration escapes imprisonment and searches for her missing family, becoming the Spider-Person known as Silk. Apparently a source claims that the series is being refocused toward “a more male-skewing audience”. They’ve had successes with either male- or female-skewing shows, like Reacher, Jack Ryan and The Terminal List for the former, and The Summer I Turned Pretty for the latter. Some are already believing it’s motivated by the expected underperformance of the just-released and widely-panned Madame Web, that somehow women “aren’t the right audience” for superheroes.

Meanwhile, somehow Spider-Man Noir is advancing along with no issue, to the point that Nicolas Cage is reportedly in serious talks to take on the title role…again…sort of. Yes he voices a Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and will likely reprise the role in Beyond following a silent cameo at the end of Across, but at least at the time the series was announced, it was said that the star of the live action series would not be a Peter Parker version like the trilogy’s, instead older and grizzled, which the latter’s did not indicate.

Nothing was indicated about a change of rollout, which at last check was a linear-first premiere on MGM+ before global rollout on Prime Video.

Sources: The Ankler, Variety