Spider-Man Writer David Koepp Talks About His Scrapped Trilogy Plan

The Spider-Man movies starring Tobey Maguire are some of comic book cinema’s most defining films. The trilogy which launched in 2002 helped redefine the genre and proved it could be a juggernaut. In the years since, Maguire’s and director Sam Raimi’s names are often tossed around when discussing the film but one name does not get brought up as much as it should. The first film in that Spider-Man trilogy owes a lot of its creative credits to writer David Koepp, the same writer who penned Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible. As it turns out, Koepp had ideas for where to take the trilogy and he had a chance to bring them to life with the Andrew Garfield reboot.

Koepp is currently promoting his You Should Have Left film but in interviews for the home release if Universal’s movie has been asked about his work with super hero films. “There was a time maybe seven or eight years ago when I was gonna come back for a couple Spider-Man movies, after they’d done their first Amazing Spider-Man,” Koepp explained to Collider. “On the very first Spider-Man I sort of planned out what I thought the first three movies should be, and then all the assorted personalities it didn’t work for me to keep writing the Spider-Man movies…”

The writer almost went back to tell more Spider-Man stories, many of which were going to pull from th unused ideas he had for the first Spider-Man movie, but he ultimately decided against such a move. “So I was excited to come back and try to finish the story I started telling in the first one,” he explained. and as we were about to agree that I was going to do that, I pulled out all the old stuff and I started outlining those two movies and I thought, ‘Boy, you can’t go home again. That moment has passed. The time when I was really feeling it was 10 years ago, and there’s no point in trying to recreate it.’ So I bailed.”

The story Koepp envisioned is quite different from what came to fruition in Raimi’s trilogy.

“Basically [my trilogy idea] was the telling of the Gwen Stacey/Harry Osbourne story but I spaced everything out differently,” Koepp said. “I wanted Gwen to be killed in the middle of the second movie, because that follows sort of the Empire Strikes Back model, and I had different villains I wanted to use. Just a different way to tell that story.”

Gwen Stacy was, however, killed off in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, so it seems his efforts may not have gone completely unheard. In Raimi’s trilogy, the character was not introduced until the third film with Bryce Dallas Howard in the role.