Cinema
This is what James Cameron's 'Spider-Man' would have looked like with Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger...
Problems with the rights to the character meant that the project never came to fruition.
It took him a while to get going, as other superheroes like Batman and Superman already had several movies behind them, but Spider-Man’s movie career is already very prolific. With Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland playing Peter Parker in three different sagas, our friendly neighbor has already had no less than 8 adaptations on the big screen, but... But what about the ones we don’t know about that were never made? One of them was planned by none other than James Cameron.
What would James Cameron’s Spider-Man have been like?
‘Avatar’, ‘Aliens’, ‘Titanic’, ‘Terminator 2′, ‘Abyss... Cameron is one of those directors who need no introduction, just take a look at his filmography to realize that we are talking about a true legend of the seventh art. What almost no one knows is that Cameron had really ambitious plans to produce a Spider-Man movie in the late 80s and early 90s.
Two names come to mind when talking about his protagonists, and not just any two. One of them is Leonardo DiCaprio, by then a beardless teenager - he was almost a teenager in ‘Titanic’ (1997) - and whom Cameron would have counted on to become his own Peter Parker. This version of Parker would have had to face the action hero par excellence of the time, who was none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, and who, with films like the first installment of ‘Terminator’, ‘Predator’, ‘Commando’ or ‘Total Recall’, was a guarantee of success in the genre. The role that Cameron had reserved for the Austrian-born actor was none other than that of Doctor Otto Octavius, aka Dr. Octopus.
Cameron also had plans for other villains like Electro and Sandman to make an appearance, in addition to... Venom. “Spider-Man is the greatest movie I never made,” the director said at the Paris Film Museum. “My version of the project never saw the light of day, a very small concept art was created, although I drew something myself,” a drawing that we can see below these lines.
“I wanted to express the vertigo that the movie would induce as the fearless wall-crawler climbs into skyscrapers,” Cameron said. “I show him in an all-black suit 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”
Why didn’t it see the light of day? All indications point to a rights issue. “I think it would have been a fun film to make,” the veteran filmmaker admitted. “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.”