Spider-Man: The Movie (Tobe Hooper's Version)

Spider-Man: The Movie was a proposed superhero horror-thriller film that would serve as a loose adaptation of the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man. It was scheduled to be released somewhere during 1985. This movie also shared more in common with horror films like David Cronenberg’s The Fly and George Waggner’s The Wolfman.

Plot

According to the cancelled script, the movie would center on Peter Parker. Instead of being fifteen, Parker was depicted as being ten years older.

The young photographer ended up being turned into a spider-hybrid monster by Doctor Zork, a mad scientist who was performing experiments to build a “race of mutants.” After Parker’s transformation, Zork would attempt to convince him to be “the leader” of his other creations, but the spider-human hybrid would ultimately reject this role and engage in gory fights to the death against Zork’s mutants.

Why It Was Cancelled

• This version of the story did not sit well with Spider-Man’s late co-creator, Stan Lee. However, and when this treatment was presented to him, he persuaded the studio not to move forward with the project due to Cannon Films misunderstanding Spider-Man as a body horror mutant creature instead of an epic action-packed superhero since they weren't that familiar with the concept of Marvel.

Cast and Crew

• Tom Cruise (The Outsiders, Risky Buisness) as Peter Parker/Spider-Man.
• Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Poltergeist) as the film’s director.
• Leslie Stevens (The Outer Limits) penning a film treatment.

Results

• After finding out from Stan Lee that Spider-Man was a superhero character and not a spider-hybrid, Cannon Films fired Hooper and the rest the of production team and rejected the script altogether. As a result, this version was permanently cancelled just after finishing pre-production.
• Afterwards, Cannon Films decided to rewrite the movie from the ground up, making it far closer to the original vision created by the late-Stan Lee. They hired Ted Newsom and John Brancato to come up with a pitch of a new script for a new version of the film. This new "comic-accurate version" of the film was also cancelled in the Fall of 1987 due to Cannon Films releasing two other superhero movies that flopped, leaving them with no budget, rendering production of the Spider-Man movie next to impossible.
• A horror film about Spider-Man, titled The Spider, was released in 2024 on the cancelled project’s 40th anniversary as a fan short film on YouTube created by Andy Chen. In this short film, Peter Parker did not gain superhuman powers, but became a mutant hybrid.