James Cameron says his sexually-explicit Spider-Man is the "greatest film I never made"

9 December 2021, 13:02

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By Sam Prance

In James Cameron's original script, Peter Parker discovered that he was Spider-Man via a wet web dream.

James Cameron has opened up about the Spider-Man film he was meant to direct with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role.

Spider-Man fans will likely already know that Carolco Pictures bought the rights to adapt Spider-Man into a film in the 1990s. James Cameron was then hired to write, direct and produce the movie. The Titanic and Avatar director put together a script and even cast Leonardo DiCaprio as Peter Parker. However, James' Spider-Man was ultimately shelved and never made.

Now, James has called his version "the greatest film [he] never made" in the book Tech Noir: The Art of James Cameron.

READ MORE: Tom Holland confirmed to return as Spider-Man for another MCU trilogy

Opening up about his Spider-Man further in a roundtable with ScreenCrush, James said that his movie would have been "very different" to the Tobey Maguire trilogy. He said: "I wanted to make something that had a kind of gritty reality to it... I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience." He also compared it to Terminator and Alien.

James said that, to him, Spider-Man’s powers are "a great metaphor" for "that untapped reservoir of potential that people have" and also "a metaphor for puberty and all the changes to your body, your anxieties about society, about society’s expectations, your relationships with your gender of choice that you’re attracted to, all those things".

James' original script previously surfaced online and it's a lot more sexually explicit than any of the Spider-Man films that have come out since. Not only did Peter and Mary-Jane have a graphic sex scene on Brooklyn Bridge but Peter also discovered his powers via a scene mimicking ejaculation in a wet dream.

After Peter is bitten in the script, he has a psychotic trip and wakes up in bed thinking he's okay. He then pulls the sheets back and notices "a sticky white mass completely covering him, gluing him to his bedding". He then realises that a "pearlescent white fluid" is "oozing" from his wrists.

Oh and the sex scene with MJ involved Spider-Man mimicking how spiders have sex. Make of that what you will.

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