Michael Biehn was the first actor being considered for James Cameron’s unproduced SPIDER-MAN film

In the time between Terminator 2: Judgment Day And Titanic, James Cameron was developing a Spiderman movie. This is a well known fact and Cameron called the project “the greatest film he has never made”.

Early in development on the film, Cameron was looking to set the story around an older version of Peter Parker/Spider-Man, and the first actor he considered for the role was Michael Bihnwith whom he had worked Terminator And aliens. Biehn was 30 at the time and would have been the oldest actor to be cast as Spider-Man.

It would have been really interesting to see Biehn play the role of Spider-Man! But it was never meant to be. As Cameron continued to develop the film, he shifted focus to a much younger 17-year-old version of the character, and at that point, the director wanted Leonardo DiCaprio in the role.

DiCaprio has said in the past that he and Cameron only had “a few small talks” about the film, and the film never came to fruition. Speaking earlier about movies, Cameron said:

“I think it would have been very different. I didn’t make a move without asking [Stan Lee] authorization. The first thing you need to think about is that it’s not Spider-Man. He goes to Spider-Man, but he’s not Spider-Man. He is Spider-Kid. He is Spider-High-School-Kid. He’s kind of a geek and nobody notices him and he’s socially unpopular and all that.

Cameron went on to explain that Spider-Man is “a great metaphor,” with his superpowers representing “that untapped pool of potential that people have that they don’t recognize in themselves. And it was also in my mind a metaphor for puberty and all the changes in your body, your anxieties about society, expectations of society, your relationships with your favorite gender that you’re attracted to, all those things.

Cameron also came up with the idea to change Spider-Man’s shooters from technology invented by Peter Parker to a biological power he gains after being bitten by the radioactive spider. He said, “Going with biological web shooters as part of his biological adaptation to radioactive spider bite made sense to me.” This is an idea that Sam Raimi rolled with in his Spider-Man movies. Cameron went on to share more of his vision for Spider-Man saying:

“I wanted to do something that had a kind of stark reality. Superheroes in general have always seemed a little fanciful to me, and I wanted to do something that was more in the vein of the Terminator and Aliens, that buys right into reality. So you are in a real world, not a mythical Gotham City. Or Superman and the Daily Planet and all that sort of thing, where it always seemed very metaphorical and fairytale-like. I wanted it to be: it’s New York. Snows. A guy gets bitten by a spider. He turns into this guy with these powers and has this fantasy of being Spider-Man, and he makes this costume and it’s terrible, and then he has to improve the costume, and the big problem with him is the damn costume. Stuff like that. I wanted to ground it in reality and ground it in universal human experience. I think it would have been a fun film to make.”

Cameron never got to make his Spider-Man film because the low-budget studio Cannon Films, which owned the lick for Cameron, went bankrupt before he could get started on the film.

I would have loved to see Cameron’s Spider-Man movie! It would have been pretty wild, though, if that had happened and Biehn would have become Spider-Man.