2) James Cameron’s Spider-Man
In his wide-ranging career, James Cameron hasn’t gone wrong very often. And even when he does have a rare misstep, like the box office failure of The Abyss, there’s always a silver-lining, like achieving cult status. Well, in another universe, one of the few Cameron hiccups might have been his adaptation of Spider-Man.
But wait, you may say, how can a James Cameron Spider-Man suck? Well, let’s just say that some of the creative choices Cameron had in mind might make you think better of emo-dancing Peter Parker from Spider-Man 3.
For instance, what do you think of a potty-mouthed Spider-Man? Yes, there were a lot of swear words in Cameron’s treatment, not to mention a very uncomfortable metaphor for, ahem, nocturnal emissions when Peter wakes up the morning after being bitten by the spider to find himself covered in his organic web fluid. There’s also a scene where Peter and Mary Jane have sex on the Brooklyn Bridge, and it’s not just the awkward teenage first time kind of sex either, as Cameron works in some National Geographic level spider mating behaviour into the affair.
Cameron’s 45-page treatment became the stuff of legend, either because people had an ironic appreciation of it, or because it had Cameron’s good name. Either way, no sooner had Cameron submitted his plan for Spider-Man did one of the longest legal battles over film rights begin, a legal battle that was exacerbated when Cannon Films went bankrupt, and the Spider-Man rights ended up on the open market. It would take nearly a decade to sort it all out, and by then the only idea from Cameron to make it into Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man were the organic webshooters, to which a grateful nation of untraumatized kids is thankful.