The shocking body horror scene cut from ‘Spider-Man 3’
For a while, it looked as though Sam Raimi would be the director to make the ultimate Spider-Man cinematic experience. After garnering massive success from the first instalment of the character in 2002, the former independent film director had pulled off the impossible by making the sequel even better, with Alfred Molina playing a brilliant portrayal of Doctor Octopus opposite Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker. Once the studio got involved in the follow-up, though, things started to take a different turn.
Boasting three main villains, the last Raimi film suffered from each part of the storyline being rushed way too fast, from Harry Osbourne getting amnesia at the very beginning of the movie to the Venom symbiote arriving by happenstance after a meteor falls close to Parker and Mary Jane. While the finale fight scene may have suffered from too many CGI effects, one crucial scene would have left superhero fans with their jaws on the floor.
In the final cut of the film, Spider-Man is nearly beaten to death at the hands of The Sandman and Eddie Brock’s Venom when Osbourne swoops in from out of nowhere to save him. While this is the fan payoff moment that most may have expected, Raimi didn’t intend for Osbourne to appear in this section of the movie.
In the midst of being beaten down, Spider-Man was supposed to incapacitate Sandman by webbing up falling bricks, sending him plummeting to the ground. As Venom webs up ‘Spidey’ in the next scene, the slimy menace is about to mull Spider-Man to death before the web-slinger picks up a metal pole at the last second, impaling Venom on it.
In this version, the audience would see the human face protruding through the symbiote for the first time, only to reveal a menacing skeleton in the place of Brock. As Parker struggled to remove the symbiote halfway through the movie, the symbiote skeleton would have gotten more vicious, eating away at Brock and adopting his vocal mannerisms as it tore his flesh down to the bone.
After pulling away Brock’s skeleton, the symbiote would try to reattach itself to Spider-Man before he found out that its one weakness was high-pitched noises. The scene would then play out much like it did in the final cut of the movie, with Spider-Man managing to blow it up in a controlled explosion.
When shown to test audiences, though, many found the body horror of the ending to be too dark compared to the rest of Raimi’s iterations of Spider-Man. To make up for the final act, Brock is pulled out of the suit before returning to save it when Parker throws the bomb at the symbiote, effectively killing both of them.
With all that said, this version would have given Raimi a lot more to work with had he gone through with another sequel with Maguire. Considering that Osbourne isn’t present for the fight, he could have remained alive, with the animosity between him and Parker building to another showdown in the long-forgotten Spider-Man 4. This kind of body horror might not have been able to fly in the Raimi iteration of Spider-Man, but the execution sounds like Raimi playing to the strengths he had gained working on the Evil Dead franchise.
