Spike Lee’s Spider-Man Spinoff Nightwatch Hooks Cheo Hodari Coker To Write

You can go ahead and add Nightwatch to the growing list of Spider-Man projects percolating at Sony.

As we learned late last year, the industry giant once had its crosshairs placed on Spike Lee, director of Oldboy and Inside Man, to develop a spinoff based on the character known as Doctor Kevin Trench. And now, it appears Nightwatch has taken one giant leap towards production with Lee in tow.

That Hashtag Show has the scoop, revealing that Cheo Hodari Coker (Luke Cage) has produced a script that will now serve as the basis of Spike Lee’s live-action spinoff. Chances are Coker’s screenplay was pulled from the original treatment produced by Now You See Me screenwriter, Ed Ricourt – he was supposedly attached to Nightwatch at the very beginning, after all – though without any official word from Sony, we’ll have to file that one in the rumor cabinet for now.

For the uninitiated, Nightwatch (real name: Doctor Kevin Trench) first took flight in the pages of Web of Spider-Man #97 during the 1990s, so in the grand scheme of things, this is a fairly obscure character for Spike Lee and Cheo Hodari Coker to handle.

Nevertheless, it will form a part of Sony’s fledgling Spider-Man universe when all is said and done, so let’s just hope Lee and Coker are able to differentiate their Nightwatch movie from Spawn – the two comic book characters were often talked about in the same breath for their eerily similar costumes.

Looking further afield, next up for Sony is the release of Venom in October, before Gina Prince-Bythewood points us in the direction of Silver & Black. And after that, a live-action rendition of Morbius, the Living Vampire.