Comic book movie nerds, it’s time once again to eschew web shooters and grab a Dr. Pepper. The original Spider-Man trilogy — the ones starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst and directed by the great Sam Raimi — will return to theaters for a special weekend engagement this September.
What’s more, this special event isn’t just a first opportunity for younger fans to see the OG wall crawler in a theater, but it’ll be the first time anybody will get a chance to see the extended version of Spider-Man 2 on the big screen. (This to-the-max version, called Spider-Man 2.1, was released on home video in 2007, but has been given an up-res to 4K for this special autumn arachno-celebration.)
As cool as the news about the longer cut of the second movie may be, unless someone from the Marvel Universe builds a time machine, no one is ever going to see a version of the first film that came ridiculously close to happening — one which featured a cameo by Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine.
You may not know this little morsel of movie lore which first came to light when Jackman gave an interview in 2013, but when Raimi was shooting that first Spider-Man way back in 2001, a cameo appearance was teed up.
Keep in mind, what we now consider the Marvel Cinematic Universe was not even a gleam in Iron Man’s eye, and rights to the individual Marvel Comics characters were spread out among different Hollywood studios. Still, Jackman was in what can rightly be called the first modern superhero picture, X-Men, in 2000 — and the producers did try to get him to appear in the background somewhere in Spider-Man.
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Getting two different movie studios (20th Century Fox and Sony) to agree soon became a moot point, thanks to a bit of rotten luck.
As Jackman said in 2013, “We really tried to get me to come on and do something, whether it was a gag or just to walk through the shot or something. The problem was, we couldn’t find the suit. The suit was stuck in some thing. And so when they were in New York when I was there, we couldn’t get it together.”
Stuck in some thing. Some thing??? The mighty Wolverine and the crafty Spider-Man were both bested by… a thing??!! Maybe he means THE Thing? This is outrageous!
Jackman continued, speaking about how, by 2013, it would have been even more difficult than earlier for an X-Men crossover, because Disney purchased Marvel for a huge sum, but Fox still retained rights to the X-Men. (“Someone reminded [me] that the amount of money Fox paid compared to the amount of money Disney paid is very different.”)
Now, of course, everything is copacetic because Disney also bought 20th Century Fox, and a deal exists with Sony to essentially share the Spider-Man rights. That’s good because Jackman clearly gets what works about a shared universe.
As he said back then, “In the comic books, what’s great about it is they’re just mashing together all the time — and it’s awesome. And people are like, ‘Yeah, well, let’s get this one with that!’ And, you know, I still think, one day, there may be an ability to do it.”
An actor, a singer, a dancer, a visionary!
Okay, so (deep, nerdy breath) with the most recent Spider-Man movie featuring all three Spider-Men (Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland), and with Jackman’s Wolverine showing up in a future story like Logan, in a pocket universe in Deadpool & Wolverine, and in a hilarious, foul-mouthed “from the past” cameo in X-Men: First Class, it is abundantly clear that one need not twist the Australian hunk’s adamantium-enhanced arms too hard to get him to play this treasured character. Hence, it does not sound too unreasonable to think this crossover of the original players may still happen.
And maybe in 25-plus years there’ll be a special re-release of that movie with even more footage to talk about.