5 Actors Who Almost Played Spider-Man & Two Are Oscar Winners

Since Sam Raimi took on the task of bringing Spider-Man to the big screen in a big-budget blockbuster, there have been three actors who have played the Wall-Crawler in live-action movies. Raimi directed three Spider-Man movies, in which he cast Tobey Maguire in the role of Peter Parker and Spider-Man. When Raimi left the franchise, Sony rebooted it with Marc Webb coming on board, and his two movies starred Andrew Garfield in the lead role. That franchise reboot was cancelled after only two movies, and Marvel teamed up with Sony to co-produce both the Spider-Man movies and Spider-Man’s appearances in the MCU’s other movies. Tom Holland stars as Spider-Man right now in the MCU.

However, these three Spider-Man actors were not the only big names who were up for the role. There were other major actors who competed against both Maguire and Garfield, and one of them even won an Oscar for a different comic book movie. There were also two major stars who almost played Spider-Man for very different directors back in the 1980s and 1990s, although those movies never got made.

5) Jake Gyllenhaal

Jake Gyllenhaal played the Spider-Man villain Mysterio in Spider-Man: Far From Home, the second movie in the MCU run for the Wall-Crawler. This was actually a second chance for Gyllenhaal, who almost got a chance to play Spider-Man years earlier. After playing Spider-Man in the first Sam Raimi movie, Tobey Maguire was injured while filming the horse-racing drama Seabiscuit. This led to Sony looking at other actors to replace Maguire as Spider-Man, and Gyllenhaal was the one they chose.

In an interview about the casting, Gyllenhaal, who was dating Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson in the Raimi movies), said, “I heard the same thing. The truth of the matter is, in the end, [Maguire is] Spider-Man.” Gyllenhaal said that there were a lot of people who were up for possibly replacing Maguire in Spider-Man 2, and he was one of them. However, Maguire ended up returning and finishing off the next two movies in Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy.

4) James Franco

James Franco is best known in Marvel Comics movies for playing Harry Osborn, Peter Parker’s best friend, who ended up becoming the villain known as the Green Goblin in Spider-Man 3. However, Franco didn’t read for Harry Osborn when he tried out for the first Spider-Man movie. Franco was there to read for the role of Peter Parker. Instead of getting to play Spider-Man, he ended up playing his friend and future enemy. While Franco didn’t get the role he wanted when he tried out for the movie, he is still a huge part of Spider-Man lore.

When Sony removed Sam Raimi from the franchise and moved on to Marc Webb, Franco said that they did it before there was time to bury the corpse (via HuffPost). That said, Franco did enough to make Raimi happy, and the two of them went on to make another giant blockbuster, Oz the Great and Powerful. For several reasons, Franco never returned to the superhero genre and has not been involved in many major movies over the last decade.

3) Heath Ledger

It seems almost amazing to look at the alternate world where Heath Ledger won the role of Spider-Man instead of Tobey Maguire. This would have drastically changed the course of superhero movies in the 2000s. When Sam Raimi was planning out his first Spider-Man movie, it wasn’t Maguire that Sony wanted in the main role of Peter Parker. Instead, Sony’s top choice to play Spider-Man was actually Heath Ledger. This news came directly from Ledger’s agent, Steve Alexander.

This wasn’t a case like James Franco, who lost out on the role. Instead, it was Ledger who decided he didn’t want to take on the role because it didn’t make any sense to him. This was revealed in the documentary I Am Heath Ledger, where he was overwhelmed by his growing success after A Knight’s Tale, and he didn’t want to take away someone else’s dream. Instead, Ledger chose roles in smaller movies like Monster’s Ball and The Four Feathers. The biggest thing out of this is that backing out of Spider-Man allowed him to star as the Joker six years later, a role that posthumously won Ledger an Oscar.

2) Tom Cruise

Before Sam Raimi brought Spider-Man to the big screen, at least two major directors tried to do it first. In 1985, Cannon Films was planning a movie called Spider-Man: The Movie, which would have reimagined the story as Peter Parker becoming a tragic mutant spider hybrid. This would have been a bizarre, body-horror movie, and the only similarities would have come with the comic storylines from years later, like “The Other” or the brand-new Midnight Spider-Man comic series.

The director was supposed to be Tobe Hooper, who was best known for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and the Salem’s Lot miniseries. Humorously, the studio executives didn’t realize Spider-Man was a superhero, and they thought it was a horror tale like The Wolf Man. If Hooper had made the movie, his choice to play Peter Parker would have been a young Tom Cruise. Stan Lee read the script and intervened, saying that the script betrayed who Spider-Man is in the comics.

1) Leonardo DiCaprio

In the 1990s, James Cameron planned to direct a Spider-Man movie, and his idea was to make it R-rated, a gritty look at the world of the Wall-Crawler. This movie was in development in 1993, when Cameron worked on a script for the film, and it included what Sam Raimi later used as a metaphor for puberty, along with the organic webbing that Raimi also used. According to reports, the script was also going to include profanity and sexual content.

Cameron’s choice for Peter Parker was Leonardo DiCaprio, a few years before the director and actor teamed up for Titanic. Cameron was also looking at original villains, with big names like Arnold Schwarzenegger up for these roles. The movie ended up being dropped when the studio filed for bankruptcy, and the rights to Spider-Man ended up in a huge legal dispute. Cameron walked away and made Titanic with DiCaprio, while Schwarzenegger joined the Batman franchise.

Did you know about any of these Spider-Man stories? Which of these actors do you think would have been great in the role? Let us know in the comments below.