Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie was one of the film’s that created the comic book movie boom that we are experiencing today. It was the first cinematic outing for one of the most popular characters in the history of the medium. Spider-Man’s success and legacy cannot be understated, but Sam Raimi says that early on Stan Lee was very disappointed in what he saw.
One of the reasons that Spider-Man worked so well is that it came along at a point when digital effects had finally achieved a level of success that meant we could really see Spider-Man swinging through New York City in a way that would not have been possible earlier. However, Sam Raimi recently told Variety that the first time he showed a scene of Spider-Man flying to Stan Lee, the Marvel icon was unimpressed, though only because Lee didn’t realize the digital effects weren’t done yet. Raimi explains…
One of the greatest moments of Spider-Man was showing Stan Lee for the first time the CGI of Spider-Man flying. I’m looking at him, and he was like an uncle, you know? And he whispers in my ear, ‘That’s it?’ And then I realized he doesn’t know it’s pre-viz. He was new to the technology side of things. He was so disappointed! I almost cried! I said, ‘Stan, the world’s never seen anything like it.’ ‘Yeah, but it doesn’t look cool.’ I told him, ‘Don’t worry. It will be great.’ Anyhow, when he saw it finished, he had a bunch of tears in his eyes, because that’s his baby.
Because digital effects were still a pretty new thing in the early 2000s, you can't blame a layman like Stan Lee for not understanding that what he was looking at wasn’t complete. But one can only imagine that, as pre-viz, it didn’t look all that great. You can almost see Sam Raimi being so excited to show this to Stan Lee, the father of Spider-Man, and then becoming heartbroken and confused himself when he realized Stan Lee was heartbroken and confused.
Stan Lee was probably very confused, thinking that it looked terrible and that his Spider-Man was not going to look the way the movie looked in his head. By the end of course, it may have looked even better than Stan Lee dreamed. It’s unclear what Lee thought of Spider-Man’s organic web fluid.
Spider-Man was, of course, a massive hit, which spawned a pair of sequels, and fans are now hoping for even more Spider-Man from Raimi. It ultimately led to the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as the return of Raimi’s own Spider-Man, Tobey Maguire, in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Raimi is now involved in the MCU himself, as the director of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse if Madness, which hits theaters May 6.
