“I was never interested in the genesis story. I couldn’t get past a guy getting bit by a red and blue spider.”
So says “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” director David Fincher on how he would’ve approached Marvel’s cinematic “Spider-Man” reboot, a project he briefly flirted with before Marc Web (“500 Days of Summer”) landed the job, in a recent interview with sci-fi website io9.com.
Indeed, Fincher’s version of the story would have been quite a bit different from Webb’s, which will focus on Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) first discovering his powers while in high school. In Fincher’s movie, all of that would have been dealt with via a brief “music-video” prologue before segueing immediately into the character’s adult life.
Below you can read the full text of Fincher’s “Spider-Man” comments:
“My impression what Spider-Man could be is very different from what Sam [Raimi] did or what Sam wanted to do. I think the reason he directed that movie was because he wanted to do the Marvel comic superhero. I was never interested in the genesis story. I couldn’t get past a guy getting bit by a red and blue spider. It was just a problem… It was not something that I felt I could do straight-faced. I wanted to start with Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, and I wanted to kill Gwen Stacy.
“The title sequence of the movie that I was going to do was going to be a ten minute – basically a music video, an opera, which was going to be the one shot that took you through the entire Peter Parker [backstory]. Bit by a radio active spider, the death of Uncle Ben, the loss of Mary Jane, and [then the movie] was going to begin with Peter meeting Gwen Stacy. It was a very different thing, it wasn’t the teenager story. It was much more of the guy who’s settled into being a freak.”
So, what do you think? Would you have preferred Fincher’s version of “The Amazing Spider-Man” over Webb’s? Or do you prefer the latter’s origin-story approach?
“The Amazing Spider-Man” is scheduled for release on July 3, 2012.