James Cameron Reveals New Details On The Spider-Man Movie He Never Got To Make

Oscar-winning director James Cameron has shed new light on his attempt to make a Spider-Man film, calling it the "greatest movie I never made." Speaking to Screen Crush, Cameron said his idea for a Spider-Man movie would have had a "gritty reality to it." He said his Spidey film would have been closer in resemblance to his movies Terminator and Aliens.

"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," he said. "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."

Cameron never ended up making a Spider-Man movie, due to a variety of business and rights issues. Cameron said he tried to convince former Fox president Peter Chernin to make a deal to buy the Spider-Man rights, saying it could be a lucrative business deal in the end, but it never worked out. At the time--Cameron tried to make this Spider-Man movie between Terminator 2 (1991) and Titanic (1997)--comic book films were not as popular or lucrative as they are today.

Cameron went on to say that he learned from his failed attempts to make a Spider-Man film that it's smarter to work on his own creations instead of another company's IP. "So I think [Spider-Man not coming together] was probably the kick in the ass that I needed to just go make my own stuff," he said.

Cameron is now busy making his Avatar sequels, the first of which premieres in 2022. As for the Spider-Man series, Spider-Man: No Way Home premieres on December 17. It's the conclusion to the current trilogy, but three more films starring Tom Holland are said to be in the works.