How different might Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man trilogy have been if it took the Empires Strikes Back route?
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy will forever have a place in the superhero movie hall of fame. When the first movie came out in 2002, it heralded a new age for superhero movies, one where they could be taken more seriously, and smashed box office records while it was at it. The second movie was a smash hit, and while the third was more divisive, it didn’t undo all the good the movies had done for the genre.
Now that the trilogy has been and gone, it’s hard to imagine what the trilogy would be like if it had taken a darker path, and according to writer David Koepp, it could’ve all been very different.
Koepp is the screenwriter behind movie classics like Mission: Impossible and Jurassic Park. He also wrote the first of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies but didn’t return to work on its sequels, for better or for worse, depending on what you think of his original plans.
According to Koepp, he originally pictured the trilogy as going in a much darker direction, drawing comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back, a movie that ends with our heroes at a low point, defeated and, in the case of Skywalker, minus a hand. For Spider-Man, Koepp wanted to adapt the infamous death of Gwen Stacy story.
“Basically was the telling of the Gwen Stacy/Harry Osbourne story but I spaced everything out differently,” Koepp told Collider. “I wanted Gwen to be killed in the middle of the second movie, because that follows sort of the Empire Strikes Back model, and I had different villains I wanted to use. Just a different way to tell that story.”
Gwen Stacey did eventually show up in this trilogy, but not until the third movie, where she was played by Bryce Dallas Howard, so it looks like the producers broke with Koepp’s ideas pretty early on; she wasn’t in the first movie at all.
However, she did die in the later Amazing Spider-Man movies, which had Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man and Emma Stone as Gwen. Apparently Koepp was approached to work on those movies, but he ended up having second thoughts.
"On the very first Spider-Man I’d sort of planned out what I thought the first three movies should be, and then all the assorted personalities – it didn’t work for me to keep writing the Spider-Man movies… So I was excited to come back and try to finish the story I’d started telling in the first one, and as we were about to agree that I was going to do that, I pulled out all the old stuff and I started outlining those two movies and I thought, ‘Boy, you can’t go home again. That moment has passed. The time when I was really feeling it was 10 years ago, and there’s no point in trying to recreate it.’ So I bailed."
The ironic thing is that even though The Amazing Spider-Man 2 adapted Gwen Stacy’s death for the big screen, it didn’t go over well with fans at the time. The whole movie was kind of a let-down and didn’t get a sequel, so maybe Koepp was right to bail.
Ultimately, I’m happy that Raimi’s Spider-Man movies didn’t go down that route. Spider-Man 2 is a pretty perfect movie as it is and I don’t believe it would have benefited from Gwen Stacy’s death. The third movie, on the other hand…that’s where I would welcome some changes.
You’re welcome.
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