A decade before Sam Raimi's Spider-Man arrived in theaters, legendary director James Cameron was working on his own Spider-Man movie. From Spider-Man accidentally killing a child to a scene where he seduces Mary Jane with a "hypnotic" spider dance, it would have been very different from anything we've seen in the four Spider-Man movie franchises of the 21st century. However, a tangled web of litigation and financial problems meant that Cameron's Spider-Man movie never came to be.

Cameron actually worked on two different versions of a Spider-Man script, both of which were submitted to now-defunct studio Carolco Pictures after it acquired the movie rights to Spider-Man in 1990. The first was a complete screenplay, co-written by Barry Cohen and Ted Newsom, featuring a college-aged Peter Parker and had Doctor Octopus as the main villain. The second, written solely by Cameron, was a scriptment (a mix of a script and treatment) in which the main villain was Electro, with Sandman working as his muscle.

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Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy ultimately came to be the original and defining movie version of the web-slinger, against which the Amazing Spider-Man films and later the Marvel Cinematic Universe take on the character were inevitably compared. Before Tobey Maguire squeezed into the skin-tight suit, however, here's what James Cameron had planned for Spider-Man.

Who Would Have Played Spider-Man In James Cameron's Movie

Michael Biehn and Leonardo DiCaprio

Cameron's Spider-Man movie never got close enough to production for an actor to be officially signed to the role of Peter Parker. However, there were two actors whom Cameron was interested in for the movie's lead. The first was Michael Biehn, a favorite of Cameron's who had previously played Kyle Reese in The Terminator and Corporal Hicks in Aliens. Biehn (in his 30s at the time) was reportedly a frontrunner for the first version of the script, which had a slightly older Peter Parker. When focus shifted to Cameron's scriptment, in which Peter was still 17, the director then began eyeing Leonardo DiCaprio for the role, as he was still in his late teens at the time. DiCaprio later said that he only got as far as "a couple of chats" about the movie, but if Cameron's Spider-Man movie hadn't faltered then we would most likely have seen DiCaprio don the spider-suit.

Electro & Sandman Were The Villains In Cameron's Spider-Man

Electro and Sandman

Electro was set to be the main villain of Cameron's Spider-Man movie, though he had a different backstory from the comic book version of the character. Instead of being Maxwell Dillon, an electrical engineer who was struck by lightning while working, Cameron's take on Electro was a filthy-rich businessman called Carlton Strand. Formerly a petty criminal, Carlton was fleeing from the cops when he ran into a conceptual sculpture piece called The Lightning Field (a real structure in New Mexico) in the middle of a storm. Lightning struck and Carlton was caught at the center of a web of arcing electricity, which gifted him with the "Midas touch" of electro-powers. He can shoot electricity and control electronic devices, but also has an unfortunate habit of electrocuting any woman that he tries to get intimate with. He can shock them back to life straight afterwards, but the whole dying thing really kills the mood.

Ten years after gaining his powers, Electro sees Spider-Man performing at a party (one of Peter's side hustles) and grows interested in him. He's planning to gather together individuals who are similarly gifted with superpowers, and wants to recruit Peter. One of the people that Electro has already recruited is Sandman, who also has a different name and origin from the comics. Simply called "Boyd," Sandman was a maintenance man working at a secret military project where scientists were experimenting with bilocation. Something went wrong with an experiment and there was an explosion, resulting in Boyd's body being transubstantiated with sand. With his newfound powers he went out and started committing bank robberies, until he was recruited by Strand to be his hired muscle.

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James Cameron's Planned Spider-Man Movie Ending

Electro electrocutes Spider-Man in Marvel Knights comic book

As bad guys are wont to do, Electro ends up kidnapping Mary Jane after Peter turns down an offer to join his super-gang. He then makes Spider-Man another offer, this time trying to sweeten the deal with a pallet of two-hundred and fifty million dollars in cash. Spider-Man turns him down once again and a big climactic fight breaks out - first between Spider-Man and Sandman, which ends when Sandman gets caught in one of Electro's blasts and is turned into a molten glass statue. Then it's Spider-Man vs. Electro, in a bout that ends with Spidey swinging Electro's body into the side of a building so hard that his body is fatally broken. Peter takes off his mask and lets Electro see his face, and Electro expresses surprises that he's been defeated by a high school kid before coughing up blood and dying.

Spider-Man doesn't let Electro's pallet of millions go to waste - scattering it over the city as a surprise windfall for the people of New York. He then reveals his true identity to Mary Jane, and beats up Flash Thompson for good measure. In the movie's epilogue, Peter explains that he and MJ got into different colleges but still see each other at weekends, utters the famous "friendly neighborhood Spider-Man" line, and swings off into the night.

James Cameron's Spider-Man Would've Been More Adult

Dark Peter Parker dancing in Spider-Man 3

Cameron's Spider-Man scriptment is considerably more mature than any other iteration of the character that's appeared on the big screen, with a darker and edgier Peter Parker (sample dialogue: "If you worthless chunks of vomit show your faces around here again, I'll decorate my Christmas tree with your intestines"). It skirts the upper edges of a PG-13 rating, with Spider-Man at one point calling Electro a "motherf**ker." As public opinion mounts against him (with a little help from J. Jonah Jameson), Spider-Man becomes obsessed with being a "one-man anti-crime wave," but eventually becomes disillusioned after his attempt to chase down a gang of child thieves results in one of the kids falling off a fire escape and dying. After reaching a low point Spider-Man even turns to crime himself, robbing a drug dealer's stash of money (though he ultimately chooses to scatter the cash over a poor neighborhood instead of keeping it).

Easily the most disturbing element, however, is a scene in which Spider-Man performs a seductive spider-dance for Mary Jane while spouting trivia about the courtship rituals of spiders, before binding her to the Brooklyn Bridge with his webs and making love to her. Perhaps it's for the best that we never saw that on the big screen.

Related: Doctor Strange 2 Can Bring Back Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man

Why James Cameron's Spider-Man Movie Didn't Happen

directors prove scorsese wrong james cameron Cropped

The legal rights to Cameron's Spider-Man movie were complicated to say the least. Ultimately the project was strangled to death amid a litigation battle between seven different companies: Carolco, 21st Century Film, Marvel, MGM, Sony/Columbia, Viacom, and 20th Century Fox.

Marvel initially sold the Spider-Man film rights to Cannon Films in 1985, and Cannon had its own Spider-Man movie in development until financial troubles got in the way. Facing ruin, Cannon was bought by Pathé Communications. When producer Menahem Golan (who had been working on Cannon's Spider-Man movie) left Pathé, the Spider-Man rights were included in his severance package. He started his own studio, 21st Century Film, but after failing to raise funds he ended up selling off the rights three different ways: theatrical release to Carolco, home video release to Sony/Columbia, and television rights to Viacom.

Golan later went on to sue for a producer credit on the movie (which Cameron didn't want to give him), while Caralco sued Sony/Columbia and Viacom for the Spider-Man distribution rights, and was subsequently hit with counter-suits. In 1995, Golan's 21st Century Film sold off its entire library - including all of Cameron's Spider-Man drafts - to MGM, who then sued Marvel, Sony, and Viacom for the rights. It was around that time that Fox entered the fray, claiming it had exclusive rights to Cameron as a director under a pre-existing contract. Cameron tried and failed to convince Fox to buy the Spider-Man rights, and then reluctantly gave up on the project altogether and went to work on Titanic instead.

By the time this legal nightmare was wrapped up, Marvel, 21st Century Film, and Carolco were all bankrupt (though Marvel ultimately bounced back). The film rights to Spider-Man ended up being awarded back to Marvel, who sold them to Sony/Columbia in 1998 for $7 million. Sony soon went to work developing its own Spider-Man movie... and the rest is history.

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