David Fincher reveals why his ‘Spider-Man’ pitch was rejected
As his forthcoming thriller, The Killer, hits cinema screens, acclaimed director David Fincher has explained why his pitch for a Spider-Man film was rejected.
It’s been three years since Fincher’s last movie, Mank, a sumptuously shot, period-authentic black-and-white tribute to writer Herman J Mankiewicz, most famously known for creating Citizen Kane. The Killer marks a departure from that strain of filmmaking and is instead designed to resemble “a good B-movie”.
Based on the comic books by French graphic novelist Alexis “Matz” Nolent, the movie features Michael Fassbender as a hitman. Speaking to The Guardian, the director explained how this very modern-day assassin thriller resonated with him and how his interest was piqued by the concept of a contemporary hitman “hiding in plain sight using all of the tools that allow us to be dissociated and disenfranchised.”
While speaking about his new movie, the director revealed that he pitched a Spider-Man movie in 1999 – and why it failed to get past the initial stage. Fincher was three movies deep into his filmography by this point, having made Alien³, Se7en and Fight Club. According to the filmmaker, his idea for the web-slinging franchise involved completely skipping out the “bitten by a radioactive spider” bit.
Discussing the reaction from studio executives to his unconventional pitch, Fincher said: “They weren’t fucking interested. And I get it. They were like: ‘Why would you want to eviscerate the origin story?'”
He continued: “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.”
In a two-star review of Fincher’s new film, Far Out wrote: “The Killer is indeed an action thriller movie, and it does a commendable job of being just that – also modernising the 1998 French comic book of the same name it was based on with WeWorks, gym memberships, Amazon deliveries, cryptocurrencies and all the rest of it. But there was a genuinely fascinating character study to be undertaken here, right there waiting in the crosshairs.”
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