8 Spider-Man Movies That Almost Happened
In development hell's web for eternity.
Spider-Man is about to make his solo debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and by all accounts, it's a glorious homecoming.
This is a relief because the web-slinger's track record has been hit and miss in Hollywood, with most fans agreeing that Spider-Man 2 is his only truly definitive outing prior to Tom Holland's spandex days.
Indeed, the other two Tobey Maguire movies don't hold up particularly well by modern standards, bogged down by ropey CGI among other issues, while the Andrew Garfield era is destined to become a forgotten chapter in the Spidey's history.
But for every botched attempt at a Spider-Man film, two others have been hit with the bug repellent long before the actors even made it in front of the cameras.
Movie studios first expressed interest in bringing the wall-crawler to cinema in the early 1980s, and he endured a troubled journey to his first big-screen outing in 2002.
Although Spider-Man films are easier for Hollywood to pull off these days, there's at least one movie from every era of his celluloid lifecycle which never saw the light of day...
8. James Cameron's Spider-Man
The cinematic rights to Spider-Man were passed from pillar to post throughout the 1980s, and by the early '90s, they were under the ownership of Carolco Pictures.
It was during these wilderness years that Terminator director James Cameron had a stab at a Spidey screenplay, and it was madder than a box of radioactive arachnids.
Cameron envisaged an adults-only Spider-Man haunted by Kafka-esque nightmares, who has a penchant for swearing and getting jiggy on New York landmarks.
Yup, in this particular screenplay your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man curses like a trooper and has sex with Mary Jane Watson on Brooklyn Bridge. Marvel Comics would have been fine with all of that, right?
The script was a revised version of an earlier screenplay and featured all-new takes on Sandman and Electro as its villains, and a climactic battle atop of the World Trade Centre, during which Spidey reveals his secret identity to Mary Jane.
Whether Cameron's vision would have reached the big screen intact is debatable, but financial problems coupled with a messy and complex legal dispute forced Carolco to abandon its Spider-Man ambitions in 1992.