The... Spider-Man Is Dead

So the big movie news at the moment it seems is the fact that Spider-Man 4 has been canceled, and in it's place, a reboot which will see Spidey back in high school and showing us (again) how he gets his powers. Great.

I already saw that movie. It was called Spider-Man and it was only released less than a decade ago.

Anyway, i've noticed a few blogs and so forth going on that Sony might try to get James Cameron to do the reboot, and after him having both the number one and number two top grossing movies of all time under his belt, it isn't that stupid to be thinking of getting him.

Problem is if they even tried to, he most likely wouldn't accept as he has already given it a shot at making Spider-Man. As this article from Tech Land shows, a few of his storyboards have made their way on line. The article talks up some of the ideas for the movie such as Peter Parker being all aggressive because of his Uncle's death, and even going so far as to include a sex scene between Spidey and Mary Jane.

It seems that they only heard this third hand and don't really know much about it considering the article. You see, back in the early 1990's, Fox had the rights to Spider-Man and Cameron was approached to do the movie. He worked on it for a while and you can find his script treatment that he did out on the net. He came up with a multitude of ideas for the movie, and many people think that Raimi took alot of the ideas for the movie that he eventually directed.

This isn't true. In the first Spider-Man movie, only one idea apart from the core Spider-Man mythology stuck. Biological Web-Shooters. Cameron thought the idea that a rather ordinary teenager (he is, regardless of how intelligent he is) could not conceivably come up with a super-adhesive that mimicked spider webbing.

How could he create that shit? It's a stupid idea that he did so in the comics. The only reason it was in the comics is so they could create tension by having him need to reload a cartridge into a web shooter when he ran out. Especially when he is falling.

The idea to just have him develop biological web shooters was brilliant and it isn't any wonder why they kept it. I'm pretty sure they've even put it into the comics now, but I haven't read a Spidey comic for many years now, so I can't say.

Why didn't Cameron end up making the movie? Because of rights issues or something, I can't remember that well what happened. I believe that Fox eventually lost the rights to the movie, which were later picked up by Sony who went on to make the film trilogy. When he lost the chance to do Spider-Man (something that he had apparently tried to get underway a few times), he developed his own comic book like superhero, except he made it a superheroine... thus was born another reason that made it hard to find the awesome Dolph Lundgren movie... Dark Angel.

It is similar to how Sam Raimi, when failing to acquire the rights to make a movie about 'The Shadow', he decided to make his own superhero movie, and thus was born Darkman. The difference between Dark Angel and Darkman was that Darkman was actually good, whereas Dark Angel relied on Jessica Alba's body.