The curse of ‘Madame Web’ strikes again to kill off a promising live-action Spidey show

Amazon Prime Video giveth, and Amazon Prime Video taketh away. Just days after the fantastic news that a Nicolas Cage-starring Spider-Man Noir live-action show – Noir – was moving forward at the streaming giant, they’ve now confirmed that a long-in-development Spider-Man spinoff project will not happen.

This is Silk: Spider Society, the baby of The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang. The show would have introduced live-action audiences to Cindy Moon aka Silk, a former classmate of Peter Parker who received spider powers on the same fateful school field trip, but was then captured and imprisoned in an underground bunker for 13 years.

In Marvel comics, her captor was Ezekiel Sims, most recently seen hamming it up as the villain in Madame Web. While details of how Silk would fit into the Sony Pictures Spidey chronology are unclear, it’s entirely possible this was envisaged as a Madame Web crossover or sidequel, with Tahar Rahim reprising his role as Sims.

Cindy Moon’s comic-book storyline would fit in nicely with Madame Web‘s plot, which sees Sims attempting to wipe out young girls with Spider-powers before they become a threat to him. But, even if Silk was envisaged as set in a separate continuity from Sony’s movie universe, I suspect Madame Web’s critical and box office failure was already tainting the project for Amazon.

That said, it seems Amazon had doubts about Silk for some time. According to The Hollywood Reporter Sony and Amazon reviewed work already done on the show during the WGA strike and delayed re-opening the writers’ room afterward, which doesn’t sound like a vote of confidence in it. This means that Madame Web‘s crushing failure may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for Amazon.

But this isn’t necessarily the end of the road for Silk. Sony Pictures may be able to get another streamer interested, with THR suggesting that it might be a candidate for development on Disney Plus. Given that this wouldn’t be an MCU show and that Disney has just announced they’re scaling back Marvel releases, we don’t see that happening. Perhaps it could be a candidate for Paramount Plus or Apple TV Plus?

Cindy Moon is a great character that could use more exposure (it seems she’ll be in the next PlayStation Spider-Man games anyway) so we feel that this is a missed opportunity. That said, after Madame Web stunk up the place so thoroughly earlier this year, the notion of Spider-Man projects without Spider-Man in them is suddenly a lot less attractive.