David Koepp on his original plans for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Believe it or not, but we're coming up on almost twenty years since the release of Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN. It was a different time, when comic-book movies were nowhere near the box-office juggernauts that they have become, but SPIDER-MAN was one of the films which helped to launch the genre to new heights.

Once upon a time, David Koepp, best known for JURASSIC PARK, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, and more, was brought on to write the screenplay for Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN. While speaking with Collider, Koepp revealed that he pictured something a little different for the sequels, which namely involved killing off Gwen Stacey in SPIDER-MAN 2.

Basically [my trilogy idea] was the telling of the Gwen Stacey/Harry Osbourne story but I spaced everything out differently. I wanted Gwen to be killed in the middle of the second movie, because that follows sort of the Empire Strikes Back model, and I had different villains I wanted to use. Just a different way to tell that story.

At the end of the day, David Koepp wound up not being involved with Sam Raimi's subsequent SPIDER-MAN sequels, but he did briefly flirt with the idea of returning when Sony rebooted the franchise with THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN. "There was a time maybe seven or eight years ago when I was gonna come back for a couple Spider-Man movies, after they’d done their first Amazing Spider-Man," Koepp said. "So I was excited to come back and try to finish the story I started telling in the first one, and as we were about to agree that I was going to do that, I pulled out all the old stuff and I started outlining those two movies and I thought, ‘Boy, you can’t go home again. That moment has passed. The time when I was really feeling it was 10 years ago, and there’s no point in trying to recreate it.’ So I bailed." As we know, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 killed the franchise for a time, but Spidey is back in form now that Marvel once again has a say in the character, with a third installment of the SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING franchise in development.