Spider-Man really set the tone for what would become the wildly popular and successful superhero movie genre, and while we had to endure a lot of stinkers along the way, things really hit their stride in 2008 with Iron Man and The Dark Knight. For the 2002 movie, director Sam Raimi turned to Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp who only contributed to that first instalment.
That wasn't always the plan, though, as he's now told Collider (which promoting his new horror movie You Should Have Left) that he originally intended to return for Spider-Man 2 and 3 as well.
"Basically [my trilogy idea] was the telling of the Gwen Stacey/Harry Osborn story but I spaced everything out differently," he said of his plans for the sequel. "I wanted Gwen to be killed in the middle of the second movie, because that follows sort of the Empire Strikes Back model, and I had different villains I wanted to use. Just a different way to tell that story."
Koepp would go on to reveal that the opportunity to potentially tell that story presented itself when he was offered the chance to plan out The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and its sequel, but he explains that it was no longer the right fit for him.
"I was excited to come back and try to finish the story I started telling in the first one, and as we were about to agree that I was going to do that, I pulled out all the old stuff and I started outlining those two movies and I thought, ‘Boy, you can’t go home again. That moment has passed. The time when I was really feeling it was 10 years ago, and there’s no point in trying to recreate it.’ So I bailed."
It's a shame we never got to see his vision play out, and while Sony Pictures would go on to kill Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the sequel was a disaster, and led to them teaming with Marvel Studios (which most comic book fans agree actually worked out for the best).
Would you have liked to see Koepp's take on Spidey in these trilogies?