The History Of Every Canceled Spider-Man Movie

As a studio, Cannon Films is generally known for schlocky low-budget films. After all, this is the production company that brought us Lifeforce, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. It seems odd, but this same studio once held the rights to Spider-Man — and they were much closer to releasing their take on the story than you might think.

Cannon picked up the Spider-Man license for a paltry $225,000 in 1985, and their first idea showed a blatant misunderstanding of the character: they talked to Tobe Hooper (the director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) about making a horror-influenced adaptation in which Spider-Man would have been transformed by someone named Dr. Zork into a human/spider hybrid, complete with eight limbs, and battled against Dr. Zork's other creations rather than joining them.

Luckily, the Spider-Man horror movie was reworked. Cannon's next version of Spider-Man would have featured Peter Parker in college, with Dr. Otto Octavius as the primary villain. Uncle Ben's death, the reluctant Peter saving the day — it's all there. Cannon even made a teaser trailer for the film, and targeted several actors. Tom Cruise was suggested for Peter Parker before they settled on Scott Leva, while Peter Cushing and Bob Hoskins were also looked at for various roles. It's intriguing to imagine what might have been, but given Cannon's track record, it's for the best that this didn't work out.

Before Titanic, before Avatar, James Cameron explored the very real possibility of a Spider-Man franchise. He told Collider that he even wrote an 80 or 90-page treatment of the first film, but Carolco, the studio he was working with at the time, went under. Cameron's Spider-Man had some bizarre scenes, including Peter using his powers to peep on Mary Jane while she changed and a scene during which he describes the mating habits of spiders as he has sex. On the Brooklyn Bridge.

Depending on which treatment of the film you look at, Cameron had some casting ideas in mind as well. Leonardo DiCaprio was considered for both Peter Parker and Harry Osborn, while Drew Barrymore was considered for Gwen Stacy. Robyn Lively, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Molly Ringwald were in the running for Mary Jane, Maggie Smith was Aunt May, and R. Lee Ermey was J. Jonah Jameson. 

In some versions, the planned villains were Electro and Sandman, who would have been ideally played by Lance Hendrickson and Michael Biehn. According to the Telegraph, another of Cameron's treatments would have also featured Terminator 2 alums Arnold Schwarzenegger and Edward Furlong as Doc Ock and Peter Parker, respectively. We can picture it, but that doesn't mean we want to see it.

Sam Raimi's Spider-Man franchise helped to set the stage for modern superhero films, with the second entry still regarded as one of the better comic book films ever made. The third film crashed extremely hard, but Raimi, of course, wanted things to turn out differently — there were even rumors that he'd film a fourth and fifth film back to back in order to meet studio demands.

The director told Yahoo! Entertainment that he thinks about his planned fourth movie "all the time." He continued: "It's hard not to, because each summer another Spider-Man film comes out! So when you have an unborn one, you can't help but think what might have been."

Raimi's fourth Spider-Man movie would have seen our hero square off against Vulture (John Malkovich) and Mysterio (Bruce Campbell). Den of Geek writes that other villains were tossed around — including Electro, Lizard, and even the formation of the Sinister Six — but these two seemed the most likely candidates. There were also rumors that Black Cat would debut and turn into a villain called "The Vulturess" so she didn't seem like a ripoff of Catwoman.

The studio got cold feet after the response to Raimi's third film and decided to go a different direction. Raimi's longtime storyboard artist, Jeffrey Henderson, released some storyboards from the unmade fourth chapter and a few memories of what the duo had planned. It sounds like it could have been fun, but it's probably best that the Maguire/Raimi train came to a stop after Spider-Man 3.

Sony has repeatedly laid the groundwork for a Sinister Six movie. Rumors about a villain-centric Spidey spinoff flew after the film was heavily hinted at during a post-credits scene in Amazing Spider-Man 2, but it was shelved after that movie underperformed. Hopes were revived after Spider-Man: Homecoming introduced Vulture as its central villain and included Shocker, Tinkerer, Prowler, and Scorpion. Mysterio entered the fray in Spider-Man: Far from Home, and Kraven the Hunter and Norman Osborn are rumored to show up in the next sequel. Producer Amy Pascal, for one, still seems very on board with the idea.

All that being said, there has been almost no real news on the villain-centric film, and Drew Goddard, who was linked to the earlier Sinister Six spinoff, has several other projects that are currently in production (including the rumored X-Force film). Maybe this Spider-Man movie hasn't been canceled yet, but it seems unlikely we'll see it in the near future — or in the iteration that has been discussed. That said, Pascal has talked about it within the context of Spider-Man's current role in the MCU, so it's still a possibility that the Sinister Six could seek revenge.

Before Sam Raimi was handed the keys to the Spider-Man film kingdom, Sony had several other directors in mind to bring the wallcrawler to the big screen. By 1999, they had narrowed their options down to four: Michael Bay, Chris Columbus, Barry Sonnenfeld, and David Fincher. They eventually approached Fincher (and did so again when they rebooted the franchise after Raimi), but he pitched himself right out of contention. Fincher himself summed it up nicely, recalling, "I was asked if I might be interested in the first Spider-Man, and I went in and told them what I might be interested in doing, and they hated it."

Fincher told io9 that he wanted the first ten minutes of the film to essentially be a "music video" showing Spider-Man's origin, including how he got his powers, the death of his uncle, and losing Mary Jane Watson. From there, Fincher said, "I wanted to start with Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, and I wanted to kill Gwen Stacy." He wasn't interested in telling the origin story beyond that; instead, he wanted to focus more on the psychology of the character and the "idea of a teenager, the notion of this moment in time when you're so vulnerable yet completely invulnerable."

Fincher reportedly wanted Edward Norton to play the role — which might seem a bit strange, as Norton was 30 years old, but then again, Tobey Maguire was nearly 30 when he played the part.