James Cameron remembers the Spider-Man movie he never got to make

Back in the 1990s, before the Marvel Cinematic Universe and even before Tobey Maguire donned the iconic Spider-Man suit, Nicholas Hammond was the most well-known actor who had ever played Peter Parker, having appeared in the 1970s TV show the 1970s television series The Amazing Spider-Man. A big-budget Spider-Man movie was inevitable. And initially, Terminator and Aliens director James Cameron was on board to develop his own very unique version of it with  the blessing of Spider-Man creator Stan Lee…but it ultimately fell apart.

Cameron’s Spidey movie will forever remain the one that got away. I mean, the failure didn’t really hinder his career, what with him going on to debut Avatar in 2009 and then watching it become the most lucrative movie of all time. But still, decades later, the director continues to ponder what what have been, calling it “the greatest movie I never made” in his new book Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron.

So why didn’t this film happen? It came down to rights issues. Cameron worked with production company Carolco to secure the needed rights, but the company went bankrupt. Eventually, Sony began developing movies with Sam Raimi at the helm and Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, and the rest is history.

“I think it would’ve been very different,” Cameron recently told Screen Crush. “I didn’t make a move without asking [Stan Lee] permission.”

James Cameron’s vision for a Spider-Man movie

So how would Cameron’s version have set itself apart from what we have now? “The first thing you’ve got to get your mind around is, it’s not Spider-Man. He goes by Spider-Man, but he’s not Spider-Man,” Cameron explained. “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.”

"I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it. 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."

Cameron saw his Spider-Man movie as a metaphor for “that untapped reservoir of potential that people have that they don’t recognize in themselves,” as well as “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.”

It sounds like Cameron would’ve made his movie more of a character study than an all-out action-packed popcorn flick. Perhaps, in an unexplored branch of the multiverse, there’s a reality where this film hit theaters and broke box office records.

That said, fans can’t be too disheartened. Spider-Man has been given his due and then some on the big screen, with three different live-action franchises in the past 20 years. And very soon, all three modern-era Spider-Men — Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland — will team up in Marvel Studios’ Spider-Man: No Way Home, which comes out on December 17!

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