Decades before Marvel Studios and Sony teamed up to introduce Tom Holland’s most recent take on the “Spider–Man” franchise and years before Sam Raimi broke records with his iteration of the Webslinger, James Cameron was lined up as the man who would bring Peter Parker to the big screen. And according to the filmmaker, in true Cameron fashion, the film would have been unlike any other iteration of Spider-Man that had been seen in TV shows or comic books up to that point.
Developed back in the mid-1990s, James Cameron was set to take on a “Spider-Man” film, which could have predated the horrible “Batman” sequels and even the “Blade” films. However, the rights issues ended up throwing everything into chaos, and the film was shelved. That said, in a new interview with Screen Crush, Cameron went into detail about what his take would have been in a “Spider-Man” film, and as you might expect, he wasn’t going to be totally accountable to comic book lore.
“The first thing you’ve got to get your mind around is it’s not Spider-Man,” explained Cameron. “He goes by Spider-Man, but he’s not Spider-Man. He’s Spider-Kid. He’s Spider-High-School-Kid. He’s kind of geeky, and nobody notices him, and he’s socially unpopular and all that stuff.”
Fans of Spider-Man know this is the foundation for the character and has followed Peter Parker in all modern iterations. The filmmaker went on to say that the idea of focusing on a teen Spider-Man created the metaphor with his superpowers representing “that untapped reservoir of potential that people have that they don’t recognize in themselves. And it was also in my mind a metaphor for puberty and all the changes to your body, your anxieties about society, about society’s expectations, your relationships with your gender of choice that you’re attracted to, all those things.”
And one of the biggest changes Cameron was hoping to introduce is the idea of biological web-shooters, a big deviation from the comic book lore. Peter Parker proves his scientific prowess in the original comics by developing web fluid that helps him swing from the NYC skyscrapers and entangle villains. Cameron thought it was better just to have that come from the spider bite.
“Going with the biological web-shooters as being part of his biological adaptation to the radioactive spider bite made sense to me,” Cameron said.
Of course, this idea would actually carry over to Sam Raimi’s trilogy of “Spider-Man” films, with Tobey Maguire’s webs coming from his wrists instead of web-shooters. But outside of that, it doesn’t seem like Cameron’s tonal ideas carried over into Raimi’s uber-colorful, often silly film series.
“I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it,” he added. “Superheroes in general always came off as kind of fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that would have been more in the vein of ‘Terminator’ and ‘Aliens,’ that you buy into the reality right away. So you’re in a real-world, you’re not in some mythical Gotham City. Or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that sort of thing, where it always felt very kind of metaphorical and fairytale-like. I wanted it to be: It’s New York. It’s now. A guy gets bitten by a spider. He turns into this kid with these powers, and he has this fantasy of being Spider-Man, and he makes this suit, and it’s terrible, and then he has to improve the suit, and his big problem is the damn suit. Things like that. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun film to make.”
As mentioned, eventually, the project fell apart due to the studio not wanting to spend the money to secure the film rights to “Spider-Man.” And the situation taught Cameron a valuable lesson.
“I made a decision after ‘Titanic’ to just kind of move on and do my own things and not labor in the house of others’ IP,” he explained. “So I think [‘Spider-Man’ not coming together] was probably the kick in the ass that I needed to just go make my own stuff.”
And the rest, as they say, is history.