James Cameron's Original Spider-Man Plans Still Influenced the First Movie

06/18/2020 11:10 am EDT

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie trilogy is now a classic piece of comic book movie-making, but a lot of older fans remember the time when Avatar and Terminator director James Cameron was the one who was almost at the helm of the Spider-Man movies franchise. The breakdown of what Cameron's Spider-Man would've been has been a point of fascination for Marvel fans, and it truly is a worthy investment of time to read through it all (click the link). However, what's also pretty interesting is a new report that breaks down just how much influence James Cameron had over the Raimi Spider-Man films!

Spider-Man screenwriter David Koepp sat down with IGN, and part of that conversation inevitably turned toward the subject of Spider-Man. According to Koepp, James Cameron's ideas for a Spider-Man movie definitely influenced Raimi films - and the entire comic book movie genre - in a big way:

"I had a lot of my own specific thoughts about what the movie ought to be because I had been a Spider-Man fan as a kid and young adult," Koepp said. "But [Cameron's] treatment, it just took it seriously. It took Peter seriously as a character and it took a superhero movie seriously as a genre. And you hadn't seen that before... This was 2000 and 2001 when I was writing (Spider-Man) and there hadn't been a good superhero movie since probably the second Batman. X-Men was still yet to come... The fact that he had written this 85 or whatever it was pages treatment, that in itself was really meaningful and said, no, no, take this seriously. This is a real movie with real people in it."

James Cameron's foresight as a filmmaker is pretty much his superpower. He saw that niche genre films could become major blockbuster draws earlier than most (Aliens); Pioneered computer-generated visual effects as major event spectacles (T2: Judgement Day); and of course, ushered in a new age of photo-realistic CGI and 3D visuals (Avatar). It's good to know that as a side-gig, Cameron also managed to convince Hollywood that comic book movies had immense value as potential serious dramatic / action blockbusters. At this point, it's really getting hard to think of a single person who has managed to influence modern cinema more than James Cameron.

As for what Cameron has planned next: nothing less than revolutionizing the experience of underwater filmmaking and aquatic visual effects, which he will present to the world with the arrival of Avatar 2 in 2021.

David Koepp's next film release is You Should Have Left. Watch our interview with him, above.

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