Published
In March 2017, the Silver & Black announcement had everything a real film has: a title, a director (Gina Prince-Bythewood), a studio strategy and eventually a release date. It is also one of the few projects in this site’s ledgers to be cancelled on the record rather than by silence, which makes its file unusually complete.
What was announced
Silver & Black paired two corners of the Spider-Man license Sony retained after the Marvel deal: Silver Sable, the mercenary head of Wild Pack, and Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, the most-requested Spider-character never properly adapted (Felicity Jones’ pre-Cat cameo in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 being the closest pass). Prince-Bythewood, then best known for Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights, was a genuinely bold hire for a franchise tentpole; the project carried Chris Yost script drafts, a February 2019 date at its peak, and the full weight of Sony’s build-a-universe-around-the- supporting-cast strategy, announced in the same wave that produced Venom.
The cancellation, on the record
Silver & Black died visibly, which is rare. Through 2017–18 the project cycled through rewrites without reaching production; the release date came off the calendar; and in 2018 Sony confirmed the film was cancelled, with the characters to be developed separately — the corporate phrasing for never. Neither solo film has ever received a date. Prince-Bythewood’s exit produced the story’s famous epilogue: she made The Old Guard and The Woman King in the years the team-up would have occupied, a run acclaimed enough to reframe the cancellation as her escape, and she has spoken since about the development grind with the candor of someone who no longer needed the job.
The prototype it turned out to be
History filed Silver & Black as the first draft of the strategy the world later met as Morbius and Madame Web: Spider-Man’s orbit, minus Spider-Man. Its cancellation predated those films’ releases — and their receptions retroactively recast the 2018 decision as the strategy’s one act of quality control. The Black Cat remains unadapted, perennially rumored and perennially unscheduled, which returns her to the jurisdiction of the tracker and its method: announced, cancelled, discussed, three different statuses, and this project uniquely wore all three. The era’s other on-the-record cancellations sit one file over, in the DC ghosts ledger — Silver & Black is their Sony cousin, the film that died with a paper trail.