It took a while to start, and other superheroes like Batman or Superman already had several films behind them, but the career of Spider-Man In cinema she is already very prolific. With Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland in the role of Peter Parker throughout three different sagas, our friend and neighbor already has no less than 8 adaptations on the big screen, but… and what about the that we do not know, and were not carried out? One of them was planned by none other than James Cameron.
What would James Cameron’s Spider-Man have been like?
‘Avatar’, ‘Aliens: The Return’, ‘Titanic’, ‘Terminator 2’, ‘Abyss’… Cameron is one of those directors who needs no introduction, you just have to take a look at his filmography to realize it. that we are talking about a true legend of the seventh art. What almost no one knows is that Cameron had truly ambitious plans to produce a Spider-Man movie in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Two names come to the fore to talk about their protagonists, and we are not talking about just any two. One of them is that of Leonardo Dicaprio, at that time a beardless teenager – he was almost that in ‘Titanic’ (1997), and who Cameron would have counted on to become his personal Peter Parker. This version of Parker would have had to face what was then the quintessential action hero, who was none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and with films like the first installment of ‘Terminator’, ‘Predator’, ‘Commando’ or ‘Total Challenge’, it was a guarantee of success in the genre. The role that Cameron had reserved for the actor of Austrian origin was none other than that of Doctor Otto Octavius, Dr. Octopus.
Cameron also had plans for other villains like Electro or Sandman made an appearance, in addition to… Venom. “’Spider-Man is the greatest film I have ever made,” said the director at the Paris Cinema Museum. “My version of the project never saw the light of day, a very small conceptual art was created, although I drew something myself”, a drawing that we can discover below these lines.
“I wanted to express the vertigo that the movie would have induced, when you climb to high altitudes with the wall-crawler without fear,” said Cameron. “I show him in an all black suit, anticipating that I wanted to see the symbiote version of Spider-Man at some point in history, whether in the first film or the sequel. “I always think about what is to come.”
Why didn’t it end up seeing the light of day? Everything seems to indicate that it was due to a question of rights. “It would have been a fun movie to make,” acknowledged the veteran filmmaker. “I made the decision after ‘Titanic,’ to do my own stuff instead of other people’s IP. So I thought that Spider-Man not getting ahead was the kick in the ass I probably needed to do my own job.”
