10 Things You Need To Know About James Cameron's Spider-Man
6. It's A Mish-Mash Of Previous Scripts
James Cameron's take on the material was more informed by those previous scripts than the actual source material, his scriptment being mostly devoid of original ideas and mostly just a fusing together of a bunch of previous ideas Carolco had been floating. He was the original mash-up artist! Except instead of complimenting beats, it was sort of a mess of bad ideas. That included the organic web-shooters and villain trying to convince Spidey to join his mutant master race, which appeared in an earlier treatment by Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, an even lower-budget, horror-tinged take to be helmed by Tobe Hooper; electrical storms and weird natural disasters came from the original screenplay; and the Neil Ruttenberg screenplay involved a Dark Knight Rises-esque attack on the Stock Exchange. All of those got thrown into the mix with Cameron's take. A surprising amount of that mish-mash scriptment turned up in Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man film, too: the confrontation between Peter and school bully Flash in Raimi's movie was storyboarded in the Cameron version and looks identical, and the organic web-shooters thing was carried over.
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/
