True Story Of The 8 Best Spider-Man Movies Never Made
6. Late 1980s - The Spider-Man Horror Film
Cannon purchased the film rights for the (on reflection) paltry sum of $225,000, and across the late 1980s, they toyed with several different ideas for a Spider-Man movie.
One of the strangest of these was a story in which Peter Parker was transformed into an enormous hairy tarantula. This horror-fuelled concept stemmed from the fact that Cannon bosses Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus didn't understand what Spider-Man was about, and they even got as far as hiring Leslie Stevens to write the script.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre helmer Tobe Hooper was proposed as the director of this project, so it would likely have been pretty horrific and intense - not exactly faithful to the source material, but regardless, Hooper was a talent behind the camera.
After Stan Lee stepped in and convinced the company to scrap this mutant Peter Parker idea, Cannon pivoted, commissioning Ted Newsom and John Brancato to write a new story. In this version, Peter Parker and Otto Octavius were turned into their respective super-powered alter-egos in a cyclotron accident, before the villain tried to destroy New York. Fairly standard stuff. Tom Cruise and Bob Hoskins were also bandied about as potential stars during this time, although neither signed on.
After a few more years and a few more rewrites, Cannon fell into financial trouble and the project was cancelled, leading to a particularly exciting filmmaker entering the fray.