by Mike Fleming Jr | Deadline Hollywood
Sony Pictures is setting Gina Prince-Bythewood to direct Silver & Black, the film that is based on Silver Sable & Black Cat (aka Felicia Hardy) characters from Sony’s Marvel Universe revolving around its signature hero Spider-Man. Prince-Bythewood just directed the pilot for Marvel’s upcoming Cloak & Dagger series on Freeform and completed the first season of Shots Fired, the drama she created with husband Reggie Rock Bythewood. That season-ender aired Wednesday on Fox. She will rewrite the Silver & Black script originated by Thor: The Dark World scribe Christopher Yost. Matt Tolmach and Amy Pascal are producing, and Columbia Pictures execs Palak Patel and Eric Fineman are overseeing.
Silver Sable is a mercenary who runs a company that hunts war criminals while Black Cat is an acrobatic cat burglar (real name Felicia Hardy), who had a tangled romantic relationship with the webslinger in the Spider-Man comics. Both were antagonists and allies to Spider-Man. This film will cast up and is meant to follow Venom, the Spider-Man universe expansion film that will star Tom Hardy with Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer directing. Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Jon Watts-directed film that stars Tom Holland as high school student Peter Parker and his superhero alter ego, bows July 7.
On the feature front, Prince-Bythewood has directed and written Beyond The Lights, Love & Basketball and The Secret Life of Bees, and she becomes the latest female filmmaker to be set to direct a superhero film, a trend that started with Patty Jenkins helming Wonder Woman, which Warner Bros/DC opens June 2. Sony separately this week dated two other films directed by women, the Michelle MacLaren-directed The Nightingale and the Elizabeth Banks-directed Charlie’s Angels, right after the studio set Catherine Hardwicke for the Gina Rodriguez-starrer Miss Bala. Barbie will also be directed by a woman, and the studio has Lucia Aniello directing Rough Night, its first R-rated comedy in two decades directed by a female. CAA reps Prince-Bythewood.
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