Spider-Man has been through the ringer when it comes to live-action movies. From his hilarious Electric Company appearances to the abysmal Spider-Man 3 the wall crawler has had a tultmoutus relationship with the silver screen. In the early 90’s, hot on the heels of Tim Burton’s Batman, Spider-Man was poised to make his big screen debut with James Cameron at the helm, but the movie got caught in development hell and was abandoned. However, the scriptment, not quite a script and not quite a screenplay, of the dropped movie has surfaced online over the years and it’s pretty weird.
Waking Up Stuck to the Sheets
James Cameron’s scriptment follows a pretty routine formula for a super-hero movie. Most of the script is the familiar Spider-Man origin story, which has been covered by two movies, and sticks to the tale of a nerdy kid being bitten by some fancy genetically altered spider. You know the drill. What is definitely different in the Cameron scriptment is his almost singular focus on the fact that Peter is going through puberty. Peter wakes up the day after being bit and is stuck to his bed sheets by thick, white webbing that is covering his hands and legs. Right after that scene Cameron wrote the following in the scriptment.
Hopefully this will be seen correctly as a metaphor for puberty and its awakening of primal drives.
To give Petey an outlet for all of those primal drives Cameron wrote in the familiar love story of Peter and Mary Jane. He definitely steered their romance in a stalking/bondage sort of direction.
Stalking and Binding for Love
One of the first things Peter does once he gets his spider powers is stalk the girl he has a crush on. Cameron constantly reiterates throughout the scriptment that Peter is the boy, and Spider-Man is, well, the man. Cameron wonderfully expresses this with the following excerpt.
He feels like an adult for the first time. A Man. He goes to Mary Jane’s house. Drops down from the roof and looks in her window. She turns off the light, and thinking she is unobserved, strips off her clothes.
On a separate stalking trip Peter sees Flash, her boyfriend, hitting her. It’s a pretty scummy move, to be sure, but Peter just rage storms on Flash. He follows Flash to his car and brutally beats him, slamming his head against the door of his Porsche, before telling him to stay away from Mary Jane. Then, being an angsty teenager wrestling with the throws of puberty, Peter reflects on how great it was to almost kill Flash. Naturally, Mary Jane falls in love with Peter and Spider-Man, but thinks they are separate people. At one point Spider-Man sweeps her away and takes her to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and starts to recite the various mating rituals of his favorite spiders. He then webs her arms against the bridge, makes her close her eyes so he can take off his mask, and then they have sex. She doesn’t figure it out till later that Peter and Spider-Man are the same person. During the film’s climax with its generic villains, heavily revised versions of Electro and Sandman, Electro grabs Mary Jane and forcefully makes out with her in front of Peter. She’s really just a punching bag for all the male characters in this movie.
What Got Stuck
Lots of ideas from this 90’s scriptment carried over into future iterations of Spider-Man like the organic webbing and the general beats of his origin story . It’s odd reading the scriptment now after countless superhero movies have come and gone. It’s easy to forget about a world when there weren’t many superhero movies. The general structure of Cameron’s Spider-Man is now the standard formula for all of the Marvel movies, and in a lot of ways, it was ahead of its time.
-Ian Benke
Check out the scriptment here
Worried Nerds 