It doesn’t seem to matter who is under the mask, Spider-Man remains one of the most popular Marvel characters to leap from the comics page to the big screen. Next month will see him swing into theaters for Sony and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Far from Home, the second hit movie in the wallcrawler’s third recent franchise. But we could be thinking of Spidey in a whole new way if a canceled project from the ’80s had been allowed to move forward, a horror from the director of Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
A story in Digital Spy has the info about a Spider-Man horror that B-movie staple Cannon Films ttried to get off the ground. It would’ve been directed by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘s Tobe Hooper, with a script by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens. This weirdo version of Peter Parker’s origin would’ve veered drastically from the radioactive spider bite, and instead have Parker “deliberately bombarded with radiation by a corporate scientist – named Doctor Zork – who transforms the ID photographer (not student, or journalist) into a giant eight-armed spider-hybrid, who’s so monstrous he swiftly becomes suicidal.”
The not-so-good doctor tries to get Parker to lead his race of mutants, but instead he rebels and fights against the creatures.
If this sounds more like David Cronenberg’s The Fly than your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, you aren’t alone in feeling that way. Stan Lee didn’t like that shit, either, and convinced Cannon to kill it. A new, more traditional superhero story was written which Hooper had no interest in making, and the whole thing kinda fell apart after that. But the cast they hoped to get for it was pretty incredible, especially for the ’80s…
Tom Cruise as Parker, Bob Hoskins as Doc Ock, Christopher Lee as a supporting scientist, Lauren Bacall or Katharine Hepburn for Aunt May, with Stan Lee potentially playing Daily Bugle editor J Jonah Jameson in a role that wasn’t so much a cameo as a supporting part.
The latter film might’ve been pretty cool, actually. I mean, young Tom Cruise as Peter Parker? I can see that shit happening and being alright.
Going the horror route, though, sounds like something they should continue to leave in Venom‘s wheelhouse. They’re already doing a sort of Cronenberg-style body horror with that one, and I don’t need to see it with Spider-Man, too. But if it had happened, who knows where the character would be now. We might not have had Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002, which means we’d be without everything that sprang forth because of it. Well, not having The Amazing Spider-Man 2 might’ve been a plus…
