10 Bizarre First Drafts Of Famous Movies

9. Spider-Man - A James Cameron Epic Where Doc Oc Is Bitten By The Spider

Spider-Man is so frequently on our screens that the character is already on its third incarnation - and second reboot - since 2002. It's amazing to think that Sam Raimi's movie took such a long and winding road to the screen that it was all set to be made a decade previously, with James Cameron on board as writer-director. Worried that Cameron was going to go way over budget, the studio insisted that he turn in a script budgeted at $60m, at most, or waive his $3m writers fee. Luckily for them, Cameron was absolutely willing to compromise his artistic integrity for a huge payday, and quickly turned in a script to meet their terms. How did he do it so swiftly? Well, he just took a pre-existing unused script (that had been written by six or seven different writers) and tweaked it. And by tweaked it, we mean he made it utterly incomprehensible. The script featured iconic Spider-Man villain Doctor Octopus, but not as we know him. In this version, Doc Oc was really Professor Oc (which is much less catchy), Peter Parker's physics professor. Weirdly, a significant plot point involves Parker's nemesis trying to steal his physics paper. Oh, and Doc Oc was also bitten by a radioactive spider, so confusingly also refers to himself as Spider-Man. The script was the kind of mess you might expect from one that was cobbled together from about six different versions, briefly edited by Cameron and handed in to a studio to earn him a few million. The baffling script was never made, and the resultant legal action around Cameron's involvement (20th Century Fox had a contract with Cameron granting them exclusivity on his services) ended up bankrupting two studios and Marvel. When the dust had settled and Sam Raimi was eventually picked to take over, he took one look at Cameron's existing script and decided the best thing to do would be to start again from scratch. With that confusing mess of a script, it's possible that James Cameron's movie would have been a bigger waste of money than all that litigation.