There are a lot of Spider-Man movies floating around. Everyone from Sam Raimi to Jon Watts to Phil Lord & Chris Miller, among others, have put their respective stamps on this web-crawling superhero. Having now gone through several live-action incarnations and even an animated interpretation of his multiverse, it sometimes feels like any potential Spider-Man movie just gets green-lit without question. But in a radically different era for superhero fare, that most certainly wasn’t the case. Back when Hollywood was struggling to crack the code on what to do with feature-length adaptations of Marvel Comics characters, a Spider-Man movie from director James Cameron still couldn’t become a reality.

James Cameron’s Spider-Man Begins with Another Unmade Comic Book Movie

Originally, Cameron’s sights in the world of superhero cinema were set on the X-Men, with this man set to produce a big-screen take on the characters that would be directed by Kathryn Bigelow. At a lunch where the key creative minds behind this prospective movie got to meet with the one and only Stan Lee, though, the topic of conversation drifted away from mutants to web-crawlers. Apparently, Lee gauged Cameron’s interest in handling a movie version of Spider-Man and that’s all it took to get the man behind Aliens hooked. X-Men was history. Cameron was now determined to tackle Spider-Man.

Cameron’s pursuit of the movie would eventually result in a “scriptment” that wasn’t quite a fleshed-out screenplay but did give an intricate breakdown of what the proposed movie’s storyline would be. Outlets like IGN would eventually review this piece of writing, which opted to focus, much like Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man movies, on the relationship between Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson. Also like the later Raimi movies? Peter Parker eventually finds out he can shoot webbing from his wrists rather than through web-shooters. However, the script is far from a retread of the 2002 Spider-Man movie. Case in point: the baddies here were Electro and Sandman, with each getting different names for their alter-egos than their comic book counterparts. Electro’s Max Dillon is named Carlton Strand while Sandman isn’t Flint Marko, he’s a guy named Boyd.

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James Cameron’s Spider-Man Take Included Profanity and Promiscuity

This early iteration of the project carried other elements longtime fans of the comics may not have expected, including Peter Parker carrying a penchant for profanity and a now famous sequence where he and Mary Jane Watson had sex on the Brooklyn Bridge. James Cameron was answering criticisms about the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies lacking sex decades before they would even be expressed!

This early treatment for Spider-Man is an eclectic creation, one that, much like Ang Lee’s eventual Hulk movie, is endearingly more reflective of the director’s own sensibilities more than strictly adhering to what general audiences or comic book devotees would want. Cameron had a passion for this project, which is even apparent in his modern-day comments about the film. In his book “Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron,” the filmmaker referred to Spider-Man as “the greatest movie I never made.” He also noted, outside of this book, that he wanted to make a Spider-Man movie with “a kind of gritty reality to it” to match the grounded approach of his earlier blockbusters like Terminator or Aliens.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Arnold Schwarzenegger Were Eyed as Stars

Among Cameron’s further modern-day revelations about the film have been that he planned to have the cast anchored by Leonardo DiCaprio and Arnold Schwarzenegger, with the former actor portraying Peter Parker/Spider-Man. The concept of these two working under Cameron’s watch is fascinating given that it would’ve united the two defining leading men of this director’s career. Cameron worked with Schwarzenegger on several occasions, including on The Terminator (which served as a breakout project for both men) while Cameron would catapult DiCaprio to a new level of stardom with Titanic. There could’ve been real magic here in combining these talented performers with Cameron’s gift for blockbuster filmmaking and the endlessly captivating mythos of Spider-Man.

So Why Didn’t Cameron’s ‘Spider-Man’ Happen?

Cameron was down to party with this web-crawler, but this version of Spider-Man was taken down not by the Green Goblin or Doc Ock, but by legal controversies. Today, all live-action Marvel properties that aren’t Spider-Man or adjacent to that superhero are fully owned by Disney. There’s little complication over who owns what while the full reach of Disney is apparent through how even the Sony-owned Spider-Man can now come and play in Marvel movies financed by Disney like Captain America: Civil War. But once upon a time in the 1980s and 1990s, Marvel was just another cash-strapped company willing to sell off film rights to individual characters to whoever was willing to pony up the cash.

Spider-Man, being Marvel’s hottest character, had been eagerly pursued for a movie, but by the early 90s, multiple studios had already tried and failed to get a solo feature for the superhero off the ground. 21st Century Studios had the film rights to Spider-Man at the dawn of this decade and they teamed up with another production company to finally get this blockbuster off the ground. That company was Carolco Pictures, which had financed the 1991 James Cameron movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day. This was how Cameron would get to create his Spider-Man movie, with all signs seemingly pointing to it being a surefire thing.

But then Carolco went bankrupt in 1996 and was quickly purchased by MGM. Interestingly, this studio had actually purchased parts of 21st Century years earlier, making MGM brass extra confident it had now officially secured film rights to Spider-Man. A lawsuit ensued between Marvel Entertainment and MGM, with the former company claiming that the bankruptcy of companies like Carolgo meant that the film rights to Spider-Man went back to Marvel.

In the Middle of All This Mayhem, Cameron Stood Resolute

Cameron was committed to the Spider-Man movie and even pressured his studio home, 20th Century Fox, to buy up the film rights. He would later recall that Fox didn’t want to get into all the messy legal stuff connected to the character despite Cameron’s insistence that Spider-Man would be a guaranteed juggernaut for the studio. Fox opted to pass on pursuing film rights to the property, while MGM eventually settled with Marvel out of court over Spider-Man’s film rights. With MGM out of the picture and Fox not wanting to pursue the character, Sony/Columbia Pictures snagged the film rights to Spider-Man right up.

This long legal battle left it uncertain if Cameron’s screenplay would be used, though Sony inherited it when they scored film rights to the character. At the time of announcing they’d acquired the movie rights to Spider-Man, Sony brass said they weren’t thinking about Cameron’s involvement one way or another. But per Cameron’s modern-day comments, once Fox didn’t step up to grab the film rights to Spider-Man, the filmmaker dropped the production. Not only had he opted to pursue the time-consuming epic Titanic once the legal challenges for Spider-Man became overwhelming, but he was now fully committed to original movies, which couldn’t be mired in endless litigation.

Even though Cameron considers his vision for Spider-Man a tragic missed opportunity, it’s hard to quarrel with how things turned out for either this filmmaker or this superhero on the big screen. The original Raimi Spider-Man films were a tremendous hit while Cameron, freed of the obligations that come with a superhero franchise, could pursue all the unusual original projects his heart desired. Even if it feels like things worked out for the best, though, it’s difficult not to be intrigued by what could’ve been in this scenario, especially since Raimi was so enthusiastic about this interpretation of the character. Perhaps somewhere in the deepest regions of the Spider-Verse, there is a universe where James Cameron got to direct this Spider-Man movie and was able to change superhero movies forever.