Before Sam Raimi became the director of the first Spiderman, the filmmaker James Cameron was to take care of the film. And the latter had many ideas in mind. In particular, he wanted to present Peter Parker’s transformation into Spider-Man in a slightly different way, by accentuating the sexual connotation of spider webs…
Spider-Man: Huge Classic
In 2002, Sam Raimi directs the first opus of the saga Spiderman. Made with a budget of 139 million dollars, this first installment of the spider-man proves to be a huge success with more than $825 million in revenue. The film also features comedian Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker, earning him worldwide fame. The feature film is even nominated twice for the Oscars and is therefore the starting point of a trilogy that is now cult. A success on all counts.
However, for a time, it was James Cameron who almost staged Spiderman. The director of Abyss, Terminator, Aliens, The Return or even of Avatar had other ideas for this project to adapt Spider-Man to the cinema. Indeed, in his book Black Tech: The Art of James Cameronthe filmmaker returns to certain points in his career and in particular to Spider-Man, whom he considers to be “the greatest movie I’ve ever made.”
A sexually inclined Spider-Man
James Cameron had a slightly different take on his film than Sam Raimi and Sony Spiderman. He revealed some time ago that he would have approached the feature film in a darker and more realistic way:
I wanted to do something that would have been in the vein of Terminator and Aliens, to adhere more to a cruel, dark form of reality. We would have been in the real world, and not in some kind of Gotham or Metropolis. A New York under the snow, where this guy gets bitten by a spider and turns into this hero with these powers, and fantasizes about becoming Spider-Man.
In this spirit, James Cameron saw his Spiderman as a huge metaphor for life and adolescence. It was also James Cameron who gave Stan Lee the idea for this story of a kid who is bitten by a radioactive spider.
James Cameron even wanted to go even further on the metaphor of adolescence. according to varietyJames Cameron reportedly addressed the transformation of Peter Parker into Spider-Man in a much more sexual way than Sam Raimi. Screenwriter David Koepp revealed the filmmaker’s ideas:
He took the metaphor of adolescent sexual development very far. There’s a big moment when Peter wakes up in bed with webbing threads all over him. It was… wow. I don’t know if we could have had this wet dream, but it was pretty funny. Even the fact that Cameron took this idea seriously was crazy. This legitimized the metaphor in people’s minds. But Sony would probably not have appreciated.
Thus, if James Cameron had carried out his project, the cobwebs of the hero would have had a much more sexual connotation than the 2002 version. And even more than the following adaptations whose webs are no longer organic, but are created by a tool. James Cameron would therefore have used these white filaments as a comparison with the sperm of a teenager too focused on masturbation… We let you imagine the scene.