James Cameron’s Drawings For ‘Spider-Man’ Film That Fell Through Are Unveiled
Photo 137672801 © Usataro | Dreamstime.com
James Cameron has transported viewers into the ethereal world of Pandora as well as had them recognizing the scenes of 1997’s Titanic as canon. It turns out that he could have played creator to a huge part of one other world: the Marvel universe.
According to The Direct, the filmmaker had created a script for an R-rated interpretation of Spider-Man in the mid-1990s, with the intention of possibly casting Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular superhero and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor Octopus.
Cameron had dreamed up a darker Spider-Man movie with a “gritty reality to it,” as quoted by CBR.com. He saw how glamorous superheroes were always depicted and imagined switching the script to run along the veins of Terminator and Aliens—creating a world that “you buy into… right away.”
Cameron had also pitched his film to be set during Peter Parker’s high school days, so the plot would have been vastly different. In fact, he imagined the character’s gaining of powers as a metaphor for puberty and all the changes it does to the body.
Marvel fans can have a glimpse of the Spidey that could have been in Cameron’s art book, Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron, which was published last year. The two illustrations of Cameron’s Peter Parker were recently shared by Slash Film editor Chris Evangelista on Twitter.
James Cameron’s drawings for his never-made SPIDER-MAN movie pic.twitter.com/ilsYkYkwYV
— Chris Evangelista (@cevangelista413) December 23, 2022
Right off the bat (wait, wrong movie), the mood in the conceptual artworks for the scrapped Spider-Man movie already seems more enigmatic. Cameron’s drawings see the character with glowing eyes, crawling up a skyscraper. His costumes, which run in faith with the comics, are pictured in red and black, with the latter reminiscent of the Symbiote suit.
The rights to the franchise eventually went to Sony Pictures, which helped spin the comic favorite into movie history.
[via CBR.com and The Direct, images via various sources]
