True Story Of The 8 Best Spider-Man Movies Never Made

While Spider-Man movies are cinematic staples in this day and age, the character's road to big-screen success is littered with the corpses of countless failed movie attempts, some of which sound more promising than others.

The web-slinger first leapt onto the pages of Marvel Comics in 1962, but despite his almost immediate popularity, it took a whopping 40 years for the character to be given the blockbuster movie treatment, with Sam Raimi crafting a trilogy of films that are consistently ranked among the best comic-book adaptations ever made.

But it hasn't always been good news.

During that 40 year time period - and even after it - the amount of unmade Spider-Man movies is on par with the amount of successful ones, but just because they never came to fruition, that doesn't mean the ideas themselves were rotten to the core.

Some of these unmade Spider-Man movies could've been genuinely enjoyable and creative, fun and strange, and in some cases, even great. With major names like Tom Cruise and James Cameron being associated with these potential projects over the years, there's a rich and interesting history here, and it began back in the late 1970s...

The Spider-Man movie franchise is currently one of the most popular on the planet, so it's quite bizarre to learn that the character's cinematic life almost began with a fantasy-musical, an idea that was shopped around by filmmaker Steve Krantz.

Krantz had been a producer on the iconic 1967 animated Spider-Man series, and throughout the early 1970s, he spent a period of time trying to get a Spider-Man musical off the ground. In 1975, Krantz even wrote a letter to Stan Lee about this idea, mentioning names like Elton John and Mick Jagger as potential stars. Imagine that.

Fortunately though, this pitch never took off, and in 1976, Krantz reworked his Spider-Man film into something a bit more conventional. His new idea for a movie drew from comic-book storyline The Night Gwen Stacy Died, but Krantz also wanted to include a 100-foot robot... and some Nazis!

Maybe "conventional" is the wrong word.

It sounds deliriously enjoyable and crazy - in a good way - but in the end, Krantz was forced to admit defeat when he couldn't get enough momentum behind the project.