David Koepp, the screenwriter behind films including Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, has revealed his original plans for the Sam Raimi trilogy of Spider-Man films.
While Koepp was enlisted to write the screenplay for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), in an interview with Collider, the screenwriter discussed his plans for the scrapped trilogy including a Gwen Stacy/Harry Osbourne storyline but due to things not working out with the team, he didn’t return for the sequels.
“Basically [my trilogy idea] was the telling of the Gwen Stacy/Harry Osbourne story but I spaced everything out differently. I wanted Gwen to be killed in the middle of the second movie because that follows sort of the Empire Strikes Back model, and I had different villains I wanted to use. Just a different way to tell that story.”
Although Koepp wanted to explore her death, Raimi and the team didn’t introduce Gwen Stacy until Spider-Man 3 – with Bryce Dallas Howard taking on the role – and didn’t insert this plot point as the film attempted to juggle Peter and Mary-Jane’s relationship, Sandman, Hobgoblin, and Venom all at the same time.
Koepp continued to explain that he was nearly given the opportunity to revisit his story ideas when he entered talks to map out The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and The Amazing Spider-Man 3, but he believed “the moment had passed.”
“There was a time maybe seven or eight years ago when I was gonna come back for a couple Spider-Man movies, after they’d done their first Amazing Spider-Man. On the very first Spider-Man, I sort of planned out what I thought the first three movies should be, and then all the assorted personalities it didn’t work for me to keep writing the Spider-Man movies… So I was excited to come back and try to finish the story I started telling in the first one, and as we were about to agree that I was going to do that, I pulled out all the old stuff and I started outlining those two movies and I thought, ‘Boy, you can’t go home again. That moment has passed. The time when I was really feeling it was 10 years ago, and there’s no point in trying to recreate it.’ So I bailed.”
However, Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy was killed off in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, so it seems Koepp’s efforts were not completely ignored by Sony Pictures.
Are you disappointed that David Koepp’s plans for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy were scrapped? Let us know in the comments below or tweet us @flickeringmyth…
