In a new interview, James Cameron reveals the grittier take on Spider-Man that he wanted to make. Cameron, one of the most prolific and well-known directors working today, is responsible for iconic films like The Terminator, Aliens, Titanic, and Avatar. The Oscar-winning writer, director, and producer is currently hard at work at the numerous Avatar sequels he has in development, the first of which is due out at the end of 2022.
Much like Cameron's varied filmography, the character of Spider-Man has gone through several tonally unique iterations over the past twenty years, starting with Sam Raimi's 2002 film starring Tobey Maguire. After three films, Raimi handed the Spider-Man reigns over to Marc Webb for his two The Amazing Spider-Man movies starring Andrew Garfield. Most recently, the web-slinger was reinvented once more (and incorporated into the MCU) with Jon Watts' Spider-Man: Homecoming trilogy starring Tom Holland. Cameron has spoken about his envisioned Spider-Man film in the past, revealing that Leonardo Dicaprio and Michael Biehn were his top choices for the role of Peter Parker and that he even wrote a treatment for the film.
In a new interview with Screen Crush, Cameron goes into further detail about the Spider-Man film he wanted to make in the 1990s before Raimi ultimately got his version off the ground. According to Cameron, his take would have been more akin to Terminator or Aliens, ditching the more "fanciful" elements of superhero stories and instead grounding the story in the real world. The film would also focus on Peter's suit and the struggles the character has to make something that actually works. Check out Cameron's full comment below:
“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. 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.”
Cameron even explains that the web-shooters he envisioned for the character would have been biological instead of mechanical, noting that approach just "made sense for him" because his version of the character would have focused on Peter Parker's struggles of going through puberty. Interestingly, Raimi also agreed with that idea and incorporated it into his own Spider-Man films. While Cameron regularly bounced ideas off of the late Stan Lee and had his blessing, the film ultimately couldn't get off the ground due to various rights issues. According to Cameron, Sony had "questionable attachment to the rights and Fox wouldn't go to bat for it," out of fear of legal repercussions.
While Cameron certainly paints a very different picture of Spider-Man than most people are familiar with, The Dark Knight proved in 2008 that audiences are more than happy to embrace grittier, more realistic takes on superheroes. While Spider-Man is inherently more lighthearted than Batman, Cameron's take seems like it still would have focused on the teenage aspects of Peter Parker and the human experiences that most people are familiar with. It's incredibly unlikely that audiences will ever get to see Cameron's take on Spider-Man (or any superhero), but it's certainly interesting to think about how the entire MCU may be different today had he had his shot at making the film. Audiences get to see how the current Spider-Man trilogy comes to an end when No Way Home releases on December 17th exclusively in theaters.
Source: Screen Crush
