In the late 1980s/early 1990s, Avatar, Aliens, and The Terminator director James Cameron had ambitious plans for a live-action Spider-Man movie.
After writing the screenplay with Barry Cohen and Ted Newson, he'd have directed the movie. While we've heard about many possible casting ideas the filmmaker had (Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor Octopus was one of them, believe it or not), Leonardo DiCaprio was expected to play Peter Parker.
It's one of those movies fans will likely always wonder about; instead, Sam Raimi helmed 2002's Spider-Man, with Tobey Maguire playing the web-slinger and a tone more in line with Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's comics instead of the R-Rated adventure Cameron likely had planned.
Electro and Sandman were expected to be Cameron's villains, though a quote attributed to the director at Cinematheque Francaise in Paris confirms he also had plans for Venom.
"And then there's Spider-Man, the greatest movie I never made," he said. "Because my version of the project didn't get off the ground, very little concept art was created for it, although I did draw a couple of pieces myself."
"This is a sketch I did, in Prismacolor on black paper, to get myself in the mood for writing the script."
"I wanted to express the vertigo that the movie would induce, when going up high-rises with the fearless wall-crawler. I show him in an all-black suit here-anticipating that I would want the Venom alien symbiote version of Spider-Man to show up somewhere in the story, either in the first film or the sequel. I always think ahead," Cameron concluded.
In 2021, he admitted that Spider-Man "would have been a fun film to make," explaining that rights issues ultimately killed the movie. However, he still walked away with a valuable lesson. "I made a decision after Titanic to just kind of move on and do my own things and not labor in the house of others’ IP. So I think [Spider-Man not coming together] was probably the kick in the ass that I needed to just go make my own stuff."
"I think it would’ve been very different," Cameron said, revealing he viewed the character's journey as representing "a metaphor for puberty and all the changes to your body, your anxieties about society, about society’s expectations, your relationships with your gender of choice that you’re attracted to."
Check out his Venom tease in the X post below.