Back in the early 90s, coming off the success of The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and the blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgement Day, director James Cameron turned his attention towards the fledgling superhero genre and Marvel’s Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. Ultimately, he would fail to get his Spider-Man movie off the ground, paving the way for Sony to acquire the rights and launch the first series of movies under Sam Raimi, and now during a Q&A at the L.A. Times Hero Complex Film Festival, Cameron has spoken briefly about his attempt to bring the wall-crawler to the screen:
“Spider-Man. Spider-Man was kind of going nowhere,” states Cameron (via Collider). “Canon — a very low budget film company back in the 80s — had had it briefly. Nobody had really done anything with it. Marvel characters in general weren’t being developed very well at that time. I got Carolco Pictures to buy Spider-Man. I was going to launch that as a series of films. I wrote quite an extensive treatment – I think eighty or ninety pages long — And then again when Carolco collapsed, those rights were in play and I didn’t pursue it because I was on to Titanic and I was doing other things. When I was a kid: to me there were all the superheroes and then there was Spider-Man. So having not gotten Spider-Man, it’s not like I’m looking around for the next comic book character.”
“With great power, comes great opportunity…”
If you’re interested in what his take might have been like (beyond those two storyboard images), you can find Cameron’s full Spider-Man treatment here.
Originally published June 2, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
