Spider-Verse Creators Lord and Miller Likely Out at Sony TV

According to a new report, Sony Pictures Television is unlikely to continue their overall deal with The LEGO Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller. The report suggests that Sony, who tapped the two in the hopes of getting a Spider-Man TV universe set up, are unsatisfied with getting just one show — Spider-Noir — out of the Spider-verse, and have clashed with Lord and Miller over budgets. Silk: Spider Society, the first series put into development under the overall deal, failed to move forward after two years of development with The Walking Dead‘s Angela Kang as showrunner.

Sony’s luck with Spider-Man spinoff projects has been spotty. The Venom films have done very well for the studio, but Morbius and Madame Web haven’t exactly set the world on fire. 

Per Puck, who did a breakdown of the biggest deals of the “peak TV” era, this deal is essentially dead because the Spider-Man stuff that Sony really wanted, hasn’t turned out the way they wanted. That’s in spite of the successful Apple TV+ anthology series The Afterparty.

Nicolas Cage reprise the role of Spider-Man Noir (but this time in live-action) in Spider-Noir, an upcoming live-action series from Prime Video and MGM+.

“I can say that we have been talking. It’s no secret that I love the character,” Cage said back in March. “I can combine my favorite golden age performances — i.e. Robinson, Cagney, Bogart — with a character that is, I guess, widely considered [to be] Stan Lee’s masterpiece. I see it as a kind of foray into a pop art mash up of, sort of, a [Jungian] Lichtenstein, mash up by way of Bogart and Cagney, but nothing’s definitive yet. It’s just conversation.”

“Expanding the Marvel universe with ‘Noir’ is a uniquely special opportunity and we are honored to bring this series to our global Prime Video customers,” said Vernon Sanders, head of television for Amazon MGM Studios, in a statement. “The extremely talented Nicolas Cage is an  ideal choice for our new superhero and the accomplished producing team with Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Amy Pascal, and the incredible team at Sony is dedicated to expanding this franchise in the most authentic way.”

Per its official synopsis, Spider-Noir “tells the story of an aging and down on his luck private investigator (Cage) in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life as the city’s one and only superhero.”