If you have been eagerly awaiting the Spider-Man spin-off, Silver and Black, well, I have good and bad news for you. The good news is that it has been assigned a release date. The bad news is that it won’t really be a Spider-Man spin-off other than in name only.
iO9 states that Sony has scheduled the film for February 8, 2019, which will put it up against The LEGO Movie 2 the same weekend. But they also said that like Sony’s Venom, which debuts four months prior and will apparently be connected to this one, it will be Spider-Man free. Yes, we are having Spider-Man free Spider-Man spin-offs. This makes sense to Sony somehow.
This really isn’t surprising. It wasn’t likely that Sony or Marvel Studios would have two lusty, spandex-clad grown women mooning after Spidey when he is just a teenager. But still…
This should fare a bit better away from Spider-Man than Venom will. Venom is most interesting in his connection to Spider-Man. While Black Cat is more tied into the Spider-Man mythos than Silver Sable is, neither are as closely tied to Spidey as Venom is and can be more easily excised here. It is basically a mercenary and a cat burglar squaring off against each other. Plenty of ways you can present that without the web-head.
What’s irksome, however, is that without the Spider-Man connection, it doesn’t need to be advertised as one. It could be called the Mauve Minx vs. the Kitty-Kat Klepto for all it matters. It seems like Sony wants it both ways. They want to have a superhero concept that ties into one of Marvel’s most popular characters, but they want it to stand alone with no direct correlation to that character. They want fans to come see these two minor parts of the Spider-Man mythos without the draw that is Spider-Man. Good luck with that.
Sony also announced that the Sicario sequel, Soldado, will be released on June 29, 2018 and that the Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly film, Holmes & Watson, has been bumped back from August 3, 2018 to November 9th of the same year.
