Despite the fact that Venom was a massive success, Sony Pictures decided to put the brakes on Silver & Black and reportedly started to develop the project as two individual movies for Silver Sable and Black Cat. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood moved on to The Old Guard for Netflix, but the spinoff seemingly remains something she's keen to work on.
During a roundtable interview with Games Radar, the filmmaker dropped some vague hints about why Silver & Black didn't happen, and it sounds like it could be...all Spider-Man's fault?!
"My honest answer is I don't know," she said when asked about the status of the movie. "I really love those characters, I loved having them together." Interestingly, it was then the director implied that the success of the Spider-Man movies is what led to Sony going back to the drawing board. "I thought, what we came up with was a really good, really organic way to have the two together. That world is changing so much because of the success of the Spider-Man films."
"There's a question of, 'Can you really have these films with Spider-Man not in them? Should he at least have some sort of part in them?' That's always the question," Prince-Bythewood continued. "I've taken two years off of that for [The Old Guard] so once this gets out into the world, I hope it's a success, and then I'll certainly go back and start talking with them again."
Now, there are two ways of reading into this; either Sony is unsure these spinoff movies can work without Spider-Man (hence why they fell out with Disney and Morbius is packed full of references to the character), or they're considering distancing the spinoffs from the MCU's wall-crawler.
The former seems more likely, but it's certainly interesting to think about what these spinoffs will look like with Spider-Man taking a much larger role in them moving forward. What do you think?
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