Was James Cameron Really Going to Make a Spider-Man Film?
Short Answer
Yes. James Cameron wrote a sweaty, hormonal, gloriously wrong for Hollywood version that nearly crawled onto screens before the lawyers and cowards strangled it.
Long Answer
The early ’90s were a strange time. You could still light a cigarette indoors, Manchester was collapsing under the weight of its own importance, and James Cameron, fresh off making robots feel things, decided he was going to drag Spider-Man out of the comics and into something angrier, wetter, and altogether less wholesome.
By 1992, Cameron had written a 57-page scriptment, charting Peter Parker’s miserable transformation into a human spider with none of the charm and all of the bodily horror. This was not a kid building gadgets. This was puberty weaponised. Organic webshooters, DNA mutations, and a love scene so gloriously misjudged it happened halfway up the Brooklyn Bridge. Peter and Mary Jane, tangled in the “web of life”, in a moment so sweaty you can practically smell the Lynx Africa and teenage regret.
The villains were stripped-down versions of Electro and Sandman: Carlton Strand and Boyd. No cackling goblins, no mad scientists. Just dirty, brute survival in a world that did not care.
It could have been brilliant. It also could have been a catastrophic, career-ending mess. Either way, it would have mattered, which is more than you can say for most of what clogs up screens now.
Marvel had already flogged Spider-Man’s rights to Cannon Films, the outfit that killed Superman with The Quest for Peace. When Cannon collapsed, they passed to Carolco Pictures, who had just bankrolled Terminator 2. They handed Cameron Spider-Man and waited for him to save them. Instead, a cold war of lawsuits strangled the project before it could crawl out of the lab.
Rumours about casting floated in the smoke. Edward Furlong was first choice for Peter Parker. Leonardo DiCaprio’s name got tossed about, more in hope than anything. Some even whispered about Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor Octopus, though Cameron’s actual villains stayed smaller and nastier.
The World Trade Center loomed large in Cameron’s plans. Peter was going to build web hammocks between the towers, with the final showdown hanging above Manhattan. History, as always, had other ideas.
Cameron later called it "the best movie I never made", with the quiet shrug of a man who knew it might have wrecked him or remade him.
So yes, James Cameron really was going to make a Spider-Man film. And no, the world does not always get the version it deserves. Sometimes it just gets the one that offends the fewest shareholders.
