Titanic Director James Cameron Details The Greatest Spider-Man Movie He Never Made

Mumbai, December 8 - Director James Cameron has helmed just 4 movies in the last 25 years and two of those - "Titanic" (1997), "Avatar" (2009), are among the highest-grossing films of all time. Even before Titanic, he directed films like "Aliens" (1986), and "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (1991), which hold a special place in the cinematic world.

However, despite being at the peak of his powers in the 90s, Cameron didn't get the opportunity to direct a Spider-Man movie, which he calls the "greatest film he never made". Cameron wrote about the Spider-Man film he wanted to make, in a book titled Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron. He attempted to make a Spider-Man movie before the character made his big-screen debut with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man movie in 2002.



Cameron told Screen Rant, as part of a roundtable promoting the book, that his version of Spider-Man was going to be "very different". "The first thing you've got to get your mind around", Cameron told Screen Crush, "is it's not Spider-Man. He goes by Spider-Man, but he's not Spider-Man. He's Spider-Kid. He's Spider-High-School-Kid. He's kind of geeky and nobody notices him and he's socially unpopular and all that stuff".

Cameron saw the film as "a metaphor for puberty and all the changes to your body, your anxieties about society, about society's expectations, your relationships with your gender of choice that you're attracted to, all those things", he added. The Oscar-winning filmmaker's Spider-Man movie would have had "a kind of gritty reality to it" as he wanted the story to take place in the real world rather than something mythical like Gotham City.

"I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it. Superheroes in general always came off as kind of fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that would have been more in the vein of Terminator and Aliens, that you buy into the reality right away. So you’re in a real world, you're not in some mythical Gotham City. Or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that sort of thing, where it always felt very kind of metaphorical and fairytale-like".



"I wanted it to be: It's New York. It's now. A guy gets bitten by a spider. He turns into this kid with these powers and he has this fantasy of being Spider-Man, and he makes this suit and it's terrible, and then he has to improve the suit, and his big problem is the damn suit. Things like that. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun film to make", he added.

He further revealed that his version of the superhero film was never off to the ground because the company he requested to buy the rights of the film went bankrupt. He even attempted to save it by going to 20th Century Fox and telling them to pick it up, but the company didn't want to get into a fight with Sony who, "had some very questionable attachment to the rights".

Meanwhile, Cameron is currently directing "Avatar 2", which is scheduled to release in December 2022. While he has produced films such as Alita: Battle Angel, the filmmaker has said that he will only direct Avatar movies, which are planned for 2024, 2026, and 2028, release apart from the currently in production for 2022 premiere.

Stay tuned...