The Best Spider-Man Movie That Was Never Made

After making the primary Spider-Man and turning it into a large hit, director Sam Raimi had a fantastic accountability: Make the sequel even higher.

With the advantage of hindsight, it’s fairly clear he did; Spider-Man 2 grossed $800 million worldwide and bought even higher evaluations than the primary Spider-Man. Today, it’s extensively considered among the finest superhero films ever made.

That doesn’t imply, although, that it was a simple movie to make, or that the trail from Spider-Man to Spider-Man 2 was an apparent one. In truth, the script for the movie went by means of many various drafts from many various writers. The ultimate screenplay is credited to Academy Award-winning author Alvin Sargent, from a “screen story” by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Michael Chabon.

“A lot of different people brought things to the story,” Raimi defined in a making of featurette included with the Spider-Man 2 dwelling video releases. “It was really finding our way through these different ideas to the ones that reverberated with me.”

In that interview, Raimi mentions all these “different ideas” got here from the aforementioned writers, plus one whose identify didn’t seem on the ultimate product: David Koepp, the only credited screenwriter on Raimi’s first Spider-Man.

Although Koepp’s identify doesn’t seem anyplace on Spider-Man 2, the script archive on his official web site contains 4 completely different drafts of what Koepp known as The Amazing Spider-Man, which was the working title of Raimi’s second Spidey movie.

READ MORE: Every Spider-Man Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

The indisputable fact that Koepp’s work on Spider-Man 2 went uncredited suggests he performed a reasonably small position within the completed movie. These drafts inform a distinct story. While they do differ from Raimi’s film in key methods, they’re additionally near what was ultimately launched in most broad strokes. Even extra curiously, a number of of the massive variations in Koepp’s Amazing Spider-Man script are superior to what wound up onscreen.

Here’s a have a look at the highlights of Koepp’s Amazing Spider-Man…

None of that is to say that Spider-Man 2 was unhealthy or that Koepp’s script was good. Spider-Man 2 stays a high-water mark for its style, and there are a number of ways in which it improves upon Koepp’s draft, most significantly in its depiction of Doc Ock as a sufferer of his ambition and a pawn of his mechanical arms’ A.I. (The notion of excellent individuals being corrupted by their laptop “assistants” packs much more of a metaphorical punch than it did in 2004.)

Still, whereas a few of this script’s greatest concepts did filter into Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, a whole lot of them have by no means seen the sunshine of day past Koepp‘s website. (Where, again, this and a bunch of other really good scripts are available to read for free.) It just goes to show you that the final writing credits on a movie don’t at all times inform the entire story.