“Spider-Noir” has been canceled, but that won’t keep a good spider down. Today, Deadline reported that Sony Pictures Television is developing a different Spider-Man television series that will stream on Prime Video. This one hails from Kelvin Yu (“American Born Chinese”), is based on the Clone Saga storyline, and will focus on Kaine Parker and Ben Reilly, two characters who have operated with the Scarlet Spider moniker over the years. Interestingly, Nicolas Cage played Ben Reilly in the 1930s-set “Spider-Noir,” but this new series will feature a different iteration of the character.
Long before the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, back when Marvel was a struggling company in the late 1990s, it licensed the Spider-Man rights to Sony. That deal led to Sony making multiple billion dollar-grossing Spider-Man films, and several years ago, Prime struck a deal with Sony Pictures Television to be the home of its Spider-Man and Spider-Man adjacent streaming projects.
A TV show called “Silk: Spider Society” was in the works for years before ultimately being scrapped, so the first project out of the gate in the Sony/Prime Video deal was “Spider-Noir.” That show was canceled after its first season, but since Sony still has the rights to over 900 characters in the Spider-Man corner of the Marvel universe, the company’s stepping right back up to the plate and trying again with this new series. “Spider-Noir” executive producers Amy Pascal, Phil Lord, and Christopher Miller are expected to be involved in the same capacity on the new show.
Who are Kaine Parker and Ben Reilly?
In the comics, a professor named Miles Warren becomes romantically obsessed with Gwen Stacy and blames Spider-Man for her tragic death. In order to get revenge, he becomes a supervillain named the Jackal and attempts to clone Spidey as part of his master plan. Kaine Parker is the result of that first cloning attempt, but the process is botched and Kaine suffers from cellular degeneration that will eventually prove fatal. Kaine is discarded in favor of Ben Reilly, the Jackal’s second and more successful cloning attempt, which gives Kaine a bit of a rejection complex. Ben, meanwhile, has suffered immense trauma and has been killed and resurrected so many times that he apparently has found favor with the Marvel universe’s version of Death.
Kaine and Ben have tussled on the page before in storylines like “Ben Reilly: The Scarlet Spider,” so there’s some precedent for a two-hander with these characters as the leads. One also assumes that the success of DC’s HBO series “Lanterns,” which features two versions of that ring-wielding titular hero, may have helped this project secure a greenlight.
As for the specifics of the new series, Deadline’s report presents conflicting information: some sources say the show “would follow Ben and Kaine as they grapple with their newly discovered identities as clones while also facing other clones,” while others suggest the series could alter the characters’ origins as clones and they might take on new identities altogether. Those two paths feel fairly distinct, so it’ll be fascinating to see how this all shakes out. Prime Video is reportedly “closing in on an order” for the series, so we’ll have to wait for a little while the deal is finalized and a release date is set.
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