Marvel’s Most Exciting Franchise Could Be in Big Trouble
Friendly neighborhood budget problems.
As hard as it can be to remember these days, there’s more to Marvel than just the MCU. The franchise used to be spread far and wide, with Fox handling X-Men and the mutants, Sony handling Spider-Man, and everything else being under the domain of Disney and the MCU. But with Disney now owning Fox, and Deadpool & Wolverine helping to merge those two universes, the field is narrowing to just the MCU and Sony, which in turn have joined forces on the MCU’s Spider-Man movies.
Sony alone has found some success with its own Spider-Man projects, but now there appears to be trouble on the horizon for one of its most exciting franchises — and it could end a TV empire before it even begins.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were hired to bring Spider-Man into TV, but results haven’t emerged.
According to Puck, Sony Pictures Television is not expected to renew its deal with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the filmmaking team behind 2018 Oscar-winner Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse. In 2019, the duo signed a five-year, nine-figure deal with the hopes of rebooting the Spider-Man franchise for television, but not much has come to fruition.
So far, the only announced projects from the deal have been Silk: Spider Society, a female-led take on the Spider-Man story, and the upcoming Spider-Verse spinoff Spider-Noir, a live-action series starring Nicolas Cage as the black and white superhero he voiced in the animated movies. Silk was greenlit by Amazon but stopped development after two years, while Lord and Miller are apparently caught up in budget disputes with Spider-Noir.
Nicolas Cage will reprise the role of Spider-Man Noir in live-action.
Could this be the end of the Sony Spider-Verse before it ever really begins? The movie side of the universe isn’t looking much healthier thanks to the failure of Madame Web. Spider-Noir is still in development for now, and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the third animated Miles Morales movie, is still on the way, but that’s about it.
The future of Spider-Man media as we know it may hang with Spider-Noir, which is an expensive, experimental series. A live-action adaptation of an animated supporting character is a big risk, although, with the high-profile Cage as the star, there’s still a chance of success. If it’s enough to win over a fanbase, we may see Spider-Man find solid footing in television. If not... well, there’s always the Spider-Verse movies and endless rewatchings of Morbius, but that’s a far cry from what Sony had first envisioned.
