10 More Insane Rules Movies Weren't Allowed To Break
4. It MUST Feature A Giant Mechanical Spider - Wild Wild West
When the Will Smith-starring Western blockbuster Wild Wild West was in development, producer Jon Peters insisted upon one thing - the film must feature a giant mechanical spider.
As it turns out, Peters had a basically fetishistic obsession with inserting a huge spider into one of the films he produced throughout the 1990s.
As Kevin Smith famously revealed many years ago, when he was hired to write Tim Burton's scrapped Nicolas Cage-starring Superman movie Superman Lives, producer Peters demanded that the third act have the Man of Steel fight a huge spider.
When Superman Lives fell through in 1998, Peters promptly recycled the idea in steampunk fashion for Wild Wild West, where a mechanical spider was villain Dr. Arliss Loveless' (Kenneth Branagh) superweapon.
In Peters' mild defense, the spider still holds up pretty well from a VFX perspective and is hardly one of the overpowering problems with the movie, even if his obsession with such a goofy idea is really quite odd.