It’s David Fincher season in Hollywood again, as the writer-director launches his latest pulpy thriller, Michael Fassbinder’s The Killer. In doing press for the film, though, Fincher has revived conversations about one of the great weird counterfactuals in superhero cinema history: What if David Fincher, not Sam Raimi, had made the early Spider-Man films?
This is per an interview Fincher gave to The Guardian this week, a wide-ranging conversation that briefly touched on the moment in 1999—so, right around Fight Club, in his personal timeline—when the director pitched studios on his own take on Peter Parker. Which would not have been quite as traditional as the version Sam Raimi would roll out a few years later, since it began with the idea of ditching the character’s famous origin story entirely, picking up with Peter as an adult. The studio’s response?
“They weren’t fucking interested,” Fincher says. “And I get it. They were like: ‘Why would you want to eviscerate the origin story?’ And I was like: ‘’Cos it’s dumb?’ That origin story means a lot of things to a lot of people, but I looked at it and I was like: ‘A red and blue spider?’ There’s a lot of things I can do in my life and that’s just not one of them.”
(Interestingly, Raimi’s own movie accelerates Peter to college age pretty quickly, leapfrogging years of high school-era material—once it’s spent its first act on all the great power/responsibility stuff, of course.)
Fincher has talked in the past about his plans for the movie, which would have allegedly put much of its focus on the Gwen Stacy material that later provided the basis for the Amazing Spider-Man duology of films. For his part, Fincher simply pushed ahead, directing Panic Room in 2002, followed by Zodiac in 2007. (Noting his own frequent shifts between genre fare and more high-brow material, Fincher ruefully noted that, “I’m so bad at [consistency]. “Because a) I don’t care. But b) At the point in time I was making Fight Club, people were saying: ‘How could you?’ And now you make something like The Killer and people go: ‘Why aren’t you doing it like your earlier, more important movies?’ I can’t win.”)