Spider-Man Spinoff Series Fires Entire Writers Room

While Silk: Spider Society is still being considered in active development, rumors have begun circulating that the series will be scrapped entirely or, at the very least, completely reconfigured before the writer’s room reconvenes.

Several staffed writers have been released from their contracts and explicitly told that they are free to pursue other projects at this time, leaving the state of Silk all webbed up.

Spider-Man is one of the world’s most beloved and recognizable characters, with many studios going above and beyond to get the rights to the character for their own piece of the entertainment landscape.

Sony is currently helming its own Spider-Man universe consisting of nearly every character in the franchise except the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. And they are producing the animated Spider-Verse films, which exist in a wholly separate canon.

The initial announcement that Amazon was working on yet another outer-universe iteration of the IP with Silk: Spider Society came as a shock to many fans, who remained cautiously optimistic that the franchise would be more like Marvel’s Homecoming and less like Sony’s Morbius.

Now, things are not looking good for Silk: Spider Society as all of the writers, save for showrunner Angela Kang, have been let go from the project as it undergoes restructuring. Kang, who previously served as the showrunner for some of The Walking Dead‘s finest seasons, has a multi-year overall deal with Amazon Prime Video, meaning her role will be transitioned to another series if the Spider Society show is officially shut down.

According to an unnamed source, Silk: Spider Society is undergoing this change due to the studio’s insistence that the series refocus its efforts at a male-dominant audience.

The show was previously poised to center on the character Cindy Moon, a Korean-American woman who gains powers after being bitten by the very same spider that sank its mandibles into Peter Parker.

While Silk: Spider Society wasn’t explicitly aiming for an all-female audience previously, the female protagonist may have caused studio executives to second guess the success of the project with comic book fans.

The heel-turn may also be caused by the latest movement from Sony’s Spider-Man universe, with the release of Madame Web.

The film, which stars an ensemble cast of leading women including Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, has opened to horrifically bad reviews, and is projected to be the first major box office bomb of 2024.

Obviously, the many issues present within Madame Web have nothing to do with the gender of the cast, characters, or audience, but producers of Silk: Spider Society may be viewing the disaster as something of a canary in the coal mine for female-led Spider-Man projects.

This is unfortunately not the first controversy to hit the production either, as the WGA recently censured Amazon for failing to reconvene several writers rooms months after the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes had concluded.

Silk: Spider Society was among the shows listed in the WGA’s letter demanding Amazon get back in business, as the series had previously completed several episode scripts before the strike began.

Source: The Ankler