The most controversial feature of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man did not occur to Sam Raimi: the culprit was James Cameron

It is the canonical event of every kid who lived through the 2000s. spider-man by Tobey Maguire was the first to come to the big screen and the adaptation of the wall-crawler was a colossal milestone for the world of cartoons. He in charge of directing the production was Sam Raimithe director who delighted us with tapes as crazy as The Evil Dead.

Such was the success of that 2002 film that Raimi was commissioned to direct a complete trilogy. The net head that we saw before us was perfectly recognizable, except for one slight detail: it did not have a net launcher. In this version Peter Parker could generate organic webs, which removed the component of depending on how much web he had left in his cartridges and applying his scientific knowledge to superheroic terrain.

Twenty-one years have passed, but the controversy surrounding that creative decision still resonates. Both Sam Raimi and screenwriter David Koepp have given explanations as to why they took this route and The answer is found in a third person: James Cameron. Yes, the director of titanic and Terminator 2 He was very close to being the author of the first Spider-Man film, both in terms of direction and script for Carolco Pictures.

That did not come to fruition, since the fight for the superhero rights turned into a fierce dispute and ended with Columbia Pictures acquiring them. So described Cameron himself his vision of the character to have been able to carry it out:

“I wanted to do something that had some reality to it. Superheroes in general have always seemed a bit fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that was more along the lines of Terminator and Aliens, where you’re pulled into reality from the start. You’re in a real world, not some mythical Gotham City, or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that kind of stuff, where it always felt very metaphorical and fairytale.

I wanted it to be: it’s New York. Is now. A guy is bitten by a spider. He becomes a boy with powers and has a fantasy of being Spiderman, he makes a suit and it’s horrible, he has to improve it and his big problem is the damn suit. Things like that. I wanted to base it on reality and the universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun movie to make.”

Among those ideas that passed through his mind, the person in charge was clear that Spider-Man would not have the classic web launchers, but the cobwebs would become organic. “It made sense to me to go for biological web shooters as part of their biological adaptation to the radioactive spider bite,” Cameron explained.

From there, Koepp read the work done by the director and it had a great influence on his position, so ended up adopting several of those ideas.

“I had a lot of specific ideas about what the movie should be like, because I was a fan of Spider-Man as a kid and a young adult. But his treatment, he just took it seriously. It took Peter seriously as a character and it took a movie seriously. of superheroes as a genre. And we hadn’t seen that before. This was in 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 yet to come. I think it came out while we were filming.

The fact that he had written this treatment of 85 or whatever pages, that in itself was very significant and said, no, take it seriously. This is a real movie with real people in it. He had some very good ideas on it. I liked the organic web shooters, some people liked it and some people didn’t, but that was his idea and I was happy to use it.”

The idea that the web was born from the body of Peter Parker was leaked before the premiere and the incipient Internet forums found fodder to criticize the decision. “It wasn’t a good thing for me. I didn’t have a great experience with the fans. I don’t think the fans thought I was the right person to direct Spider-Man in general. And then the organic web-slingers… when the fans found out that I was going that way, they tried to get me away from the movie,” remember Raimi.

“I keep the organic web shooter as a great idea. It wasn’t even my idea,” Koepp says. The truth is that although they are iconic, the other two adaptations of Spider-Man have moved away from this format. Both Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland have meted out justice with web-slingers of their own creation, just as canon has shown for decades.

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