Onlangs is er een boek verschenen over Avatar-regisseur James Cameron. Het boek The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron van Rebecca Keegan werd door /Film doorgenomen en één van de meest opvallende passages in het boek bleek de Spider-Man adaptatie die Cameron voor ogen had. Grote vraag: wat is er met dit project gebeurd? Hieronder de antwoorden die in het boek worden gegeven, inclusief een reactie van Cameron zelf.

We melden vooraf dat dit niet voor iedereen geheel nieuw is, al is de reactie van Cameron wel nieuw.

Cameron en zijn zeer geliefde script voor Spider-Man:
After True Lies, Cameron’s next project could have been based on a character he’d been dreaming about since he was a 9th grader in Chippawa— Spider-Man. He had lobbied Carolco, the independent studio behind T2, to purchase the rights to the Spider-Man comics, which they did in 1990. Carolco’s executives had a habit of seat-of-the pants deal-making that endeared the company to Cameron, who had made his $100 million Terminator sequel with them based on terms laid out in a simple half-page memo. But in this instance, a hasty contract would come back to haunt all the parties involved. Cameron wrote a Spider-Man scriptment for Carolco that was widely admired in Hollywood. The comic’s creator, Stan Lee, adored it and gave a Cameron-directed Spider-Man movie his hearty endorsement. “It was the Spider-Man we all know and love,” Lee said of the treatment. “Yet it all somehow seemed fresh and new.”

Camerons visie op Spider-Mans webschieters:
He opted to make his Spider-Man movie an origins story, explaining how Peter Parker developed his web-slinging powers. But he made some thoughtful changes to the iconic character, starting with the Spider-Man’s wrist shooters. Lee’s comic called for Peter Parker to build them himself, but Cameron thought a biological explanation was more plausible. “I had this problem that Peter Parker, boy genius, goes home and creates these wrist shooters that the DARPA labs would be happy to have created on a 20-year program,” says Cameron. “I said, wait a minute, he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider, it should change him fundamentally in a way that he can’t go back.” In Cameron’s treatment, the wrist shooters simply grow as Peter becomes spider-like…



De villain in Camerons Spider-Man en het einde van een goed en ambitieus project:
Cameron also updated the comics’ super-villain Electro for the information age in a character he called Carlton Strand. Electro was a robot that functioned on pure electric power, while Cameron’s Strand could touch a computer or a cable and absorb the data flowing through it—an acknowledgement that information itself is real power. Cameron’s scriptment is darker and more adult than anyone expected from a comic-book movie in the 1990s—Peter Parker says “motherfucker” and Spider-Man and Mary-Jane have sex atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Adult-oriented comic-book adaptations like Dark Knight and 300 found huge audiences more than a decade later, but Cameron’s writing was a dramatic departure from the accepted wisdom about the genre at the time, namely that it should be nearly as family-friendly as a Disney movie. It would have been fascinating to see what the creator of the rough-edged characters of the Terminator franchise did with the adolescent superhero. But the James Cameron version of Spider-Man never happened, because Hollywood’s real idea of super villains descended—lawyers. When Carolco filed for Chapter 11 in 1995, it became clear the company’s claim to the Spider-Man rights had been tenuous all along.

De teleurstelling bij Cameron:
“Here I am working on Spider-Man and it turns out that there’s a lien against the rights and Sony’s got a piece of it and Carolco doesn’t really own it even though they think they own it,” Cameron says. With Carolco down, Cameron tried to get Fox to go after Spider-Man. The studio would have been happy to buy their top-earning director his pet project if it had just been a matter of rights, but procuring Spider-Man now meant entering a nasty legal fight and potentially a bidding war involving multiple other studios and producers with overlapping claims on the project dating back to when Marvel had first put the film rights up for sale in 1985. “They’re so risk-averse,” Cameron says. “For a couple hundred thousand dollars in legal fees they could have had a $2 billion franchise. They blew it.”

Sony kocht uiteindelijk de rechten en Cameron koos voor een verfilming over het drama met de Titanic. We weten allemaal hoe dit heeft uitgepakt. In Sam Raimi's versie van Spider-Man zijn uiteindelijk wel enkele elementen verwerkt van Camerons script. Zo zijn de ideeën over de "web-shooters" in het eerste deel te zien. Camerons kreeg hier geen credits voor. Zijn reactie: “I’d say that wasn’t terribly polite of them. I didn’t feel that injured…slighted, but not injured.” Cameron had ondertussen al de nummer 1 film aller tijden achter zijn naam staan.

Overigens kreeg ene Graeme McMillan van de website io9 onlangs het Spider-Man-script van Cameron onder ogen en hij was niet bepaald onder de indruk: While offering up enough visual thrills and surface spectacle that you know it would’ve made an exciting movie to watch, Cameron’s Spider-Man shaves off so much of the weirdness of the character that it could be any generic teenage superhero saving his girlfriend and the The Day. We’re happier this script stayed unmade and Sam Raimi got his chance to show off his superhero chops instead and, let’s face it: Wouldn’t the world rather have had Avatar than this, in the end?

Benieuwd naar het script? Lees deze dan hier.