Continuing the trend of Spider-Man themed posts the last couple days, I thought I would take the time to point out a little known origin story of everyone's favorite wall crawler. Before Sam Raimi's blockbuster, scripts for a Spider-Man movie were kicking around Hollywood for years... one of which was incredibly disturbing.
In 1985 the rights to a Spider-Man film were sold to Cannon Films by Marvel with a five year contract. The owners of Cannon Films, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus did not know much, if anything about Spider-Man, and were under the false impression that he was a monster along the lines of The Wolf Man, which is what they told writer Leslie Stevens when they gave him the project. Stevens, most well known for creating The Outer Limits, took this idea that Spider-Man was a monster and made a film around that. What you're about to read may shock you.
In Steven's script, Peter Parker is intentionally exposed to radiation by a scientist turning him into a "hairy, suicidal, eight-armed monster". Spider-Man, a twisted monstrosity, refuses to become a part of a mutant master race and must fight against other horrible mutations in a subterranean lab to escape imprisonment.
Yea, I didn't make any of that up.
Obviously Stan Lee wasn't a fan of the complete destruction of his character and demanded for an entirely different movie. The next movie drawn up bore many similarities to what Spider-Man 2 would be, but that of course was not made either and a Spider-Man movie was kicked around until, well, the one you saw in 2002.
Is it just me or does it sound like Steven's script is just The Island of Dr. Moreau with Spider-Man thrown in there. You've got a crazy scientist turning people into animal monsters. That's the same exact story, verbatim.
It almost makes me wonder if it would have turned out better than Raimi's Spider-Man though... hmm, maybe.
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