James Cameron ville göra en Spider-Man film under 90-talet

James Cameron är utan tvekan en av de största namnen bland Hollywoods regissörer och tack vare honom har vi fått åtskilliga klassiker så som Alien, Titanic och Terminator 2. Men trots en lång och diger karriär finns där fortfarande ett drömprojekt han aldrig fick chansen att göra. I en intervju med Screencrush berättar Cameron nämligen om hur han under flera år efter Terminator 2 hade haft premiär försökte få igång inspelningen av en Spider-Man film.

"I think it would've been very different. I didn't make a move without asking [Stan Lee] permission. The first thing you've got to get your mind around, is it's not Spider-Man. He goes by Spider-Man, but he's not Spider-Man. He's Spider-Kid. He's Spider-High-School-Kid. He's kind of geeky and nobody notices him and he's socially unpopular and all that stuff."

Regissören hade flera samtal med Stan Lee om projektet men i slutändan användes många av radarparets idéer till Sam Raimi filmen istället.

"I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it. Superheroes in general always came off as kind of fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that would have been more in the vein of Terminator and Aliens, that you buy into the reality right away. So you're in a real world, you're not in some mythical Gotham City. Or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that sort of thing, where it always felt very kind of metaphorical and fairytale-like. I wanted it to be: It's New York. It's now. A guy gets bitten by a spider. He turns into this kid with these powers and he has this fantasy of being Spider-Man, and he makes this suit and it's terrible, and then he has to improve the suit, and his big problem is the damn suit. Things like that. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun film to make."

För som vi vet gled chansen helt mellan fingrarna på Cameron i samband med att Marvel tvingades sälja flera av rättigheterna till sina superhjältar i kölvattnet av deras ekonomiska problem under 90-talet.

"All of a sudden it was a free ball. I tried to get Fox to buy it, but apparently the rights were a little bit clouded and Sony had some very questionable attachment to the rights and Fox wouldn't go to bat for it. [Former Fox President] Peter Chernin just wouldn't go to bat for it. He didn't want to get into a legal fight over. And I'm like 'Are you kidding? This thing could be worth, I don't know, a billion dollars!' $10 billion later..."

Och i slutändan valde Cameron att lämna tankarna på en Spider-Man film helt bakom sig och istället fokusera på egna projekt.

"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."

Ämnet diskuteras även i den den kommande boken Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron för den som vill läsa mer. Vad tror du, hade en Spider-Man film av Cameron kunnat bli något?