Amazon reportedly scraps writers room for Spider-Man TV spin-off Silk
Showrun by The Walking Dead's Angela Kang, the Silk show has reportedly been set for a "developmental overhaul"
Messy things are afoot in the world of Spider-People this weekend, as The Ankler reports that Amazon has shut down the recently reconvened writers room for Spidey TV spin-off Silk: Spider Society. Although The Walking Dead alum Angela Kang will stay on as showrunner, the rest of its writers have reportedly been let go as the series, centered on popular comics character Cindy “Silk” Moon, gets a “developmental overhaul.”
The live-action Silk series was initially announced (under the auspices of executive producers Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Amy Pascal) back in November of 2022, and aimed at MGM+ (formerly Epix), where episodes would premiere before making their way to Amazon Prime Video. The series focuses on Cindy Moon, a new(-ish) hero created by Dan Slott and Humberto Ramos in 2014: Bitten, just moments later, by the same spider that gave Peter Parker his powers, Cindy trains to crime fight on her own before getting locked up for several years, as part of a whole plotline we’re not going to get into here, because if we have to explain shit like “Morlun” and “Spider-Totems” in this Newswire, we’re all going to be here all day.
The upshot is that Cindy—who also got teased in the recent Spider-Man 2 video game—has many of the same powers that Peter does, albeit with a higher focus on speed over strength. She’s had a pretty successful publication history, having eventually been teamed up with well-liked Marvel team the Agents Of Atlas, as well as starring in a number of ongoing series of her own.
News of the retool comes, unavoidably, amidst the lukewarm critical reception to the latest Spider-adjacent movie, Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web. (Which features, it’s worth noting, Tahar Rahim as Ezekiel Sims—a major character in Silk’s origin story.) It’s hard not to see the news about Silk—which at least one source suggested was being re-developed in order to make it “more male-skewing”—as linked to Web’s expected underperformance at the box office. Writing on the series began back before last year’s strikes, with reports that the room “had been a number of episodes deep into the season” when the Writers Guild strike shut things down; the show’s room was reconvened back in January.