Before Titanic and Avatar, even before Terminator 2 and True Lies, James Cameron almost got involved in making an X-Men movie. Cameron would have produced, Kathryn Bigelow (his wife at the time) would have directed, Chris Claremont would have worked on the script and the movie would have starred Angela Basset as Storm and Bob Hoskins as Wolverine.
Hmmm, I dunno. Kathryn Bigelow may be an Oscar winning director now, but the early 90s was her “Point Break” and “Strange Days” fallow period. Also Bob “I played f–king Super Mario” Hoskins as Wolverine? I repeat — hmmm. Then again, they could have cast Mickey Rooney as Wolverine and still made a better X-Men movie than Brett Ratner.
So why didn’t it happen? Apparently Stan Lee just couldn’t shut his damn mouth about Spider-Man.
Claremont and Lee had gone to James Cameron’s offices to put the final touches on an X-Men deal, but before they could get it done Stan Lee brought up Spider-Man and before long that’s all Cameron wanted to talk about. Cameron dumped the idea of doing an X-Men movie and instead started developing a Spider-Man movie — a movie that would never happen due to the Spider-Man licensing rights being a complete mess at the time.
Of course everything worked out fine eventually with both the X-Men and Spider-Man getting some decent-to-great movies. That said, I’m guessing Marvel stopped sending Stan Lee out to “help” pitch movies not long after this incident.
via Chicago Tribune
Stan Lee via Tim Snow