Sony’s Spider-Man universe is a curious thing. Already announced are spinoffs such as Venom and Silver & Black (featuring Silver Sable and Black Cat), and while they both sound promising so far, there’s just one problem: neither of them will include Peter Parker. That’s because the character is busy over in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the studio is unable to use him. For the time being, at least.
Still, they’re pushing on with their plans to create a whole shared universe featuring Spidey characters and after hearing that Gina Prince-Bythewood had been assigned to the director’s chair of Silver & Black, we’ve now got some rumored plot details for the film. Though none of this has been confirmed just yet, the outlet reporting on it, Splash Report, claims that they have a source who’s given them an outline of the story that will power the spinoff, and here’s how they describe it:
“Seven years after Mendel Stromm (a.k.a. Robot Master) and his two henchmen (The Scorpion and The Tarantula) killed her father, Silver Sable is hired by the government to find Felicia Hardy. The Black Cat, a master hacker and thief, has apparently stolen valuable secret information. She’s hiding in the lawless and dangerous triple frontier area between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.
Once there, Sable ask her old contact Dmitri Smerdyakov (a.k.a. The Chameleon) to locate her. But it seems, the government are not the only ones looking for the Black Cat. It seems Felicia had made a deal Stromm to save her father from a Russian prison and she’s been genetically enhanced. Now, the mad scientist wants his prized experiment back because his financier (cough Norman Osborn cough) wants a return on his investment.”
Aside from all that, the very same source claims that, as assumed, there’s no mention of Spider-Man in the movie and that we’ll also be introduced to a few other important characters, such as Dominic Fortune, Jessica Drew (Spider-Woman), Sergei Kravinoff (Kraven the Hunter), Lonnie Lincoln (Tombstone) and Charles Standish. The source wouldn’t say how all of these folks factor into the plot, but if this scoop is to be believed, then it sounds like Silver & Black is going to be a very, very busy film.
If you ask us, this one’s tough to buy. For starters, it’d be surprising to see Sony bring Norman Osborn into the picture again given that we’ve already seen him quite a bit in live-action. True, he’s a hugely important character in the world of Spider-Man, but you’d think that the studio would want to move away from him for a while, given that he was in both Sam Raimi’s series and Marc Webb’s (though he didn’t have a huge role there), as played by Willem Dafoe and Chris Cooper, respectively.
The other thing that sounds a bit far-fetched is just how many characters there are here. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 suffered from throwing too many familiar faces into the film in hopes of appeasing fans and it’s hard to believe that Sony hasn’t learned from their mistakes. Plus, people like Spider-Woman and Kraven the Hunter are major figures in Spidey’s world and it’d be a shame to see them stuffed into a movie where they can’t even have the lion’s share of the spotlight. As it is, the studio already needs to acquaint audiences with Silver Sable and Black Cat, so it wouldn’t make sense for them to try and shove even more new characters down our throats.
Of course, none of this is to say that everything Splash Report is telling us is false, as part of it may be true and perhaps we’ll see one or two of the folks they mention – it’s just hard to imagine that all of these people will appear in the spinoff. Sony may have plans to introduce them down the road, we don’t doubt that at all, but you’ve gotta believe that they know better than to stuff them all in the same movie.
With Silver & Black now having locked in a director, the casting process should begin to heat up, meaning we’ll start learning more about it fairly soon. Until we get something concrete though, tell us, do you think the project will act as an introduction for all of these characters? Or is Splash Report’s source way off? Let us know in the usual place.