Avatar director James Cameron almost helmed Spider-Man

James Cameron is a now legendary director who was responsible for such iconic films as Terminator 2, Titanic and Avatar. But now as Amazing Spider-Man 2 soars to new box office success becoming the first film of 2014 to score $500 million internationally he has revealed that he was almost behind another iconic franchise – everyone’s favourite neighbourhood Spider-Man.

In an interview with Collider James Cameron was asked if he’d ever thought about directing a superhero movie himself. The director responded with “Spider-Man. Spider-Man was kind of going nowhere. Canon — a very low budget film company back in the 80s — had had it briefly. Nobody had really done anything with it. Marvel characters in general weren’t being developed very well at that time. I got Carolco Pictures to buy Spider-Man. I was going to launch that as a series of films.”

As we all know this never came to pass as Spidey’s rights ended up at Columbia Pictures and we got Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maquire and Kirsten Dunst. These films started the comic-book revolution and Spider-Man 2 is regarded as a comic-book movie classic so that’s definitely a good thing. I do wonder what a James Cameron Spider-Man film will look like though.

He went on to add “I wrote quite an extensive treatment – I think eighty or ninety pages long — And then again when Carolco collapsed, those rights were in play and I didn’t pursue it because I was on to Titanic and I was doing other things. When I was a kid: to me there were all the superheroes and then there was Spider-Man. So having not gotten Spider-Man, it’s not like I’m looking around for the next comic book character.”

Yep, Spider-Man is the best! You’re so right James Cameron.

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