After making the primary Spider-Man and turning it into an enormous hit, director Sam Raimi had an ideal accountability: Make the sequel even higher.
With the advantage of hindsight, it’s fairly clear he did; Spider-Man 2 grossed $800 million worldwide and obtained even higher evaluations than the primary Spider-Man. In the present day, it’s broadly thought to be top-of-the-line superhero films ever made.
That doesn’t imply, although, that it was a straightforward movie to make, or that the trail from Spider-Man to Spider-Man 2 was an apparent one. Actually, the script for the movie went by many various drafts from many various writers. The ultimate screenplay is credited to Academy Award-winning author Alvin Sargent, from a “display screen story” by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar and Michael Chabon.
“Plenty of totally different individuals introduced issues to the story,” Raimi defined in a making of featurette included with the Spider-Man 2 dwelling video releases. “It was actually discovering our manner by these totally different concepts to those that reverberated with me.”
In that interview, Raimi mentions all these “totally different concepts” got here from these aforementioned writers, plus one whose title didn’t seem on the ultimate product: David Koepp, the only credited screenwriter on Raimi’s first Spider-Man.
Though Koepp’s title doesn’t seem wherever on Spider-Man 2, the script archive on his official web site consists of 4 totally different drafts of what Koepp referred to as The Wonderful Spider-Man, which was the working title of Raimi’s second Spidey movie.
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The truth that Koepp’s work on Spider-Man 2 went uncredited suggests he performed a reasonably small function within the completed movie. These drafts inform a distinct story. Whereas they do differ from Raimi’s film in key methods, they’re additionally near what was ultimately launched in most broad strokes. Much more curiously, just a few of the large variations in Koepp’s Wonderful Spider-Man script are superior to what wound up onscreen.
Right here’s a take a look at the highlights of Koepp’s Wonderful Spider-Man…
The Finest Spider-Man Film By no means Made
None of that is to say that Spider-Man 2 was unhealthy or that Koepp’s script was good. Spider-Man 2 stays a high-water mark for its style, and there are just a few ways in which it proves upon Koepp’s draft, most significantly in its depiction of Doc Ock not as a standard-issue mad scientist however as a sufferer of his ambition and a pawn of his mechanical arms’ A.I. (The notion of excellent individuals being corrupted by their pc “assistants” packs much more of a metaphorical punch than it did in 2004.)
Nonetheless, whereas a few of this script’s finest concepts did filter into Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, a whole lot of them have by no means seen the sunshine of day past Koepp‘s web site. (The place, once more, this and a bunch of actually good scripts can be found to learn without cost.)
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