10 Things You Need To Know About James Cameron's Spider-Man
9. Electro Was The Main Villain...
Cameron's take on Spider-Man was non-traditional in a lot of ways. He never actually wrote a script, instead providing a scriptment - somewhere between a treatment, which is when a writer provides a brief overview of the story that will eventually get fleshed out, and a proper screenplay. He also had something of a novel approach to many of the wallcrawler's villains. For the most part, Cameron's scriptment followed the traditional Spider-Man origin story. The bad guys got more of a liberal approach. Instead of Max Dillon, an engineer who gets powers after being struck by lightning (and instead of whatever that eel nonsense was in Amazing Spider-Man 2), he came up with own original take on Electro. Instead he was Carlton Strand, an exaggerated parody of corrupt capitalist whose megalomania sounds even more broad than anything in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, who got his powers whilst running from the cops as a young hoodlum and getting stuck by lightning whilst standing in the middle of a conceptual art piece. Yes, that is a thing that really happened.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
