Spider-Man is ‘the greatest movie I never made,’ says James Cameron

James Cameron was one of the most influential directors in the 1990s. Following a blockbuster decade of the 1980s collaborations with Arnold Schwarzenegger followed. Terminator 2 True Lies cemented his status as a bankable action director of the ’90s. The unprecedented success of Titanic He sent him into the stratosphere. He was unable to grasp Spider-Man’s property.

ScreenCrush was invited to a Zoom roundtable discussion with him and others who were promoting the new book. Tech Noir: James Cameron’s ArtCameron talked about the concept of in Tech Noir “the greatest movie I never made.”

Traces of Cameron’s Spider-Man There are many. A Variety article from 1993 says Cameron had turned in a script, an anonymous agent crows that it is “going to be as big as the Batman movie,” referencing the Tim Burton franchise. In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio told Empire that he “had a couple of chats” with Cameron about taking on the webslinger, and felt that Cameron was at least “semi-serious” about the idea.

While DiCaprio did not seem to mourn the lost opportunity to play Peter Parker, saying he wasn’t sure “anything would have changed” in his career if the movie had come to fruition, Cameron was eager to point out that his version of the character would have been very different than modern iterations.

“I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it,” Cameron said on Zoom. “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 AliensThat you can immediately accept the reality. So you’re in a real world, you’re not in some mythical Gotham City. Superman or the Daily Planet. It always felt fairytale-like and metaphorical.

“I wanted it to be: It’s New York. It’s now. He is attacked 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. These are just some of the things that happen. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience.”

Sony Pictures

Cameron, in many ways saw the same things Sam would find appealing. This includes both making Parker’s web-shooting a biological function as well as the character representing “that untapped reservoir of potential that people have that they don’t recognize in themselves.”

In 2000, IGN offered an overview of Cameron’s script. The plot is similar in many ways. Peter Parker, an awkward high-schooler, lives with Aunt May, Uncle Ben, and has a crush of Mary Jane Watson. Uncle Ben is killed by a robber, but that’s where the story starts to diverge. The police take Spider-Man into custody for Uncle Ben’s murder, who then busts out. A local TV reporter, J. Jonah Jameson (there’s no Daily Bugle), starts to declare that Spider-Man is a menace.

With references to Franz Kafka’s classic novella Metamorphosis, Cameron’s story becomes about Electro and Sandman trying to recruit Parker into a criminal organization for super-powered villains. Parker refuses to be manipulated, sleeps with MJ and curses until he defeats them at the World Trade Center. The ’90s!

Marvel Comics was struggling in the 1990s. Their last movie was Howard the Duck. Desperate for cash and getting the cold shoulder from a film industry that had been staying away from superheroes since the financial disasters of 1983’s Superman IIIThe only one who bought the rights to Spider-Man 1985 was Menachem Golan from Israel, who believed Spider-Man looked like Wolfman.

Carolco Pictures was eventually acquired the theatrical rights by Golan, who is responsible for blockbuster films like Rambo: Total Recall and Cameron’s Terminator 2. Cameron submitted his 1993 script and Golan was expelled from the project. To quote a 2002 BusinessWeek recap of the situation, “before long, everyone was suing everyone else.”

Within a year, Carolco, Golan’s company The Cannon Group, and Marvel had all declared bankruptcy. In 1998, when Marvel emerged from financial disaster, courts determined that Golan’s rights to the character had expired, the rights were sold to Sony, and the stage was set for Tobey Maguire.

So while Cameron’s Spider-Man Although the visionary project on paper never became reality, it had an impact on Hollywood nonetheless.