James Cameron’s unmade Spider-Man movie revealed in concept art

James Cameron was once set to direct a Spider-Man movie, and for the first time, we’ve been given a peek at what may have been if the project was ever made.

Prior to Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, which debuted Tobey Maguire as the friendly neighborhood hero, the Avatar director was set to sling his own web with the beloved character.

Elements of the planned film were carried into later movies: organic webshooters, Sandman getting his powers from an atom-mixing mishap, and a love story with Mary-Jane Watson.

Alas, amid financial and legal problems, Carolco Pictures relinquished the rights to Spider-Man and Cameron’s movie never made it past the concept stage.

James Cameron’s Spider-Man revealed

In his new book, Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, the director includes concept art from his unmade Spider-Man movie, shared online by Slash Film’s Chris Evangelista.

The photos show Spider-Man crawling up the reflective windows of a skyscraper, not too dissimilar to the original poster for the 2007 movie.

In an earlier roundtable interview, as reported by Screen Crush, Cameron detailed his vision for the film and how every move was carried out with explicit permission from Stan Lee.

“The first thing you’ve got to get your mind around is it’s not Spider-Man. He goes by Spider-Man, but he’s not Spider-Man. He’s Spider-Kid. He’s Spider-High-School-Kid. He’s kind of geeky and nobody notices him and he’s socially unpopular and all that stuff,” he said.

“I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it. Superheroes in general always came off as kind of fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that would have been more in the vein of Terminator and Aliens, that you buy into the reality right away.

“So you’re in a real world, you’re not in some mythical Gotham City. Or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that sort of thing, where it always felt very kind of metaphorical and fairytale-like.

“I wanted it to be: It’s New York. It’s now. A guy gets bitten by a spider. He turns into this kid with these powers and he has this fantasy of being Spider-Man, and he makes this suit and it’s terrible, and then he has to improve the suit, and his big problem is the damn suit. Things like that. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun film to make.”

You can actually read the whole “scriptment” for Cameron’s unmade Spider-Man movie here.

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