Madame Web has crashed and burned this week, but could that have anything to do with Sony's decision to go back to the drawing board with Prime Video's Silk: Spider Society?
According to The Ankler, the upcoming TV series has let its entire writers' room go, leaving only Angela Kang (The Walking Dead) as showrunner and one unnamed co-executive producer. This comes after the WGA threatened Amazon with legal action after the show's writers were left locked into contracts - meaning they were unable to take on any other projects - while not being called back to work.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse creative team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller presumably remain attached, though it's unclear if the same applies to previously announced producers Kai Wu and Jim Barnes.
The site explains that, "One source close to the series claims that Silk was being refocused with a more male-skewing audience in mind...Sources had previously told me that the Silk writers room had been a number of episodes deep into the season before the strike began."
After both The Marvels and Madame Web massively underperformed in theaters, Sony and Amazon may have concluded that a superhero TV series primarily aimed at a female audience will struggle in terms of viewership.
We'd imagine this creative shakeup stretches beyond just who the show's target audience is, though, and we can't help but wonder whether Sony has finally taken on board the issues fans and critics have with its live-action offerings (then again, perhaps they've just scrapped planned links to Madame Web).
Silk, also known as Cindy Moon, was created by writer Dan Slott and artist Humberto Ramos and first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 3, #1 in April 2014.
She was introduced as a classmate of Peter Parker who was bitten by the same radioactive spider that gave Spider-Man his powers. However, unlike Peter, Cindy was immediately taken by Ezekiel Sims (a man who also gained spider-like abilities from the same spider) and locked away in a bunker for years to protect her from the villainous Morlun, who had been hunting down individuals with powers similar to Peter's.
Years later, during the "Original Sin" storyline, Spider-Man discovers Cindy and frees her from her captivity, leading to Cindy become the web-slinging Silk. She and Peter had a brief romance, but the less said about that particular creative decision, the better.
Stay tuned for updates on Silk as we have them.