10 Movies That Had Completely Different First Drafts

6) Spider-Man

You may know that Avatar director James Cameron worked on his own Spider-Man movie throughout the 90s, before it ultimately fell through and the franchise landed in the lap of Sam Raimi. What you might not know, however, is how off-the-wall insane his Spider-Man script was.

First up, some context. In order to get his $3 million writer’s fee, Cameron had to give the studio a screenplay budgeted at $60 million. His answer was just to take an old un-produced script (that had already been doctored by about seven writers) and polish it up. The result, as expected, was an incomprehensible mess.

For one, Doctor Octopus was the main villain in this version. Except, he was inexplicably known as Professor Octopus and was also bitten by a radioactive spider – which meant he also referred to himself as Spider-Man. Oh, and his big evil scheme was basically stealing Peter’s physics paper. As if that wasn’t weird enough, Ock had a comic sidekick called Wiener and his robotic arms were referred to as Waldos.

Funnily enough, Arnold Schwarzenegger was set to play Ock – in a supervillain role that would have been even goofier than his Mr. Freeze.