We have had many, long films about Spider-Man over the years with a number of different actors who portrayed Stan Lee’s beloved character. One of those movies that we were close to seeing but never materialized was Avatar guy James Cameron’s “darker” and “more reality based” version where he initially wanted to see Aliens/Terminator star Michael Biehn in the role of Peter Parker. Cameron then shifted his focus, according to an interview with Variety, to a younger version of Spidey, and that’s when he began discussions with Leonardo DiCaprio about playing Parker.
“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. “
What do you think of a Spidey reel starring Leo, would that have worked?
