Every MCU Movie That Almost Happened In The 1990s | Screen Rant
Countless Marvel projects went unmade in the 1990s — featuring heroes as diverse as Spider-Man, Deathlok, and She-Hulk. Stan Lee had always believed his superheroes could be superstars in Hollywood, and in the 1970s he headed to Los Angeles to begin pitching ideas to studios. Unfortunately, he soon found film studios did not share his enthusiasm.
It's hard to believe now, but for decades Hollywood insiders believed the only superheroes who would work on the big screen where the marquee names. Marvel in particular struggled, because unlike their rival DC, they lacked any ties to a studio of their own. And so, for years, Marvel found themselves caught up in the same frustrating cycle; a studio would finally show a little bit of interest, things would progress, and then the plans would fall through. Moving into the '90s, though, there were signs this could be changing. Comics were becoming big business, and a string of small-screen successes — including animated series featuring both Spider-Man and the X-Men — meant Marvel characters were becoming household names. Marvel conducted a minor restructure in 1993, hoping Avi Arad could sell superheroes to Hollywood where Stan Lee had failed.
Of course, this was a long way from the eventual MCU that transformed Marvel's fate. The comic book publisher had neither the experience nor the interest in producing films themselves, and they never considered the idea of an interconnected universe. Still, Marvel had some quite ambitious plans: the following is every unmade Marvel movie from the 1990s.
Spider-Man and the X-Men were Marvel's most important brands, and they spent most of the '90s attempting to get a Spider-Man project swinging. Back in 1990, Carolco Pictures acquired the film rights for the wall-crawler, and they signed up Barry Cohen and Ten Newsom to write a basic script featuring a college-aged Peter Parker going up against the villainous Doctor Octopus. Things stepped up a notch when Cohen and Newsom were replaced by legendary writer-director James Cameron, who penned the next Spider-Man script. Unfortunately, it wasn't particularly good, serving as more of a horror than a typical superhero movie. It even featured a surreal scene in which Spider-Man seduced Mary Jane with a "hypnotic" spider dance. The movie became tangled in a web of litigation, and never happened.
The '90s should really have been the decade of the X-Men. Marvel's "Merry Mutants" had never been bigger, with record-selling comic books and a hit animated series. When the decade began, Chris Claremont and Stan Lee were in talks with Carolco Pictures to create a Wolverine & the X-Men movie, to star Bob Hoskins as Wolverine and Angela Bassett as Storm. James Cameron would ideally have produced the film, but unfortunately Lee sidetracked him by getting him interested in Spider-Man instead. The X-Men wound up in development hell until their rights were sold off to Fox several years later.
Tony Stark was destined to become the MCU's flagship superhero, but in the '90s nobody really thought Iron Man was a big deal. Universal bought the film rights in 1990, but it didn't take long for the film to wind up in the familiar holding pattern. Things began to look up a little in 1996, when the rights were sold on to Fox and Nicolas Cage began to enthusiastically push to star. Jeff Vintar and Stan Lee wrote a script pitting Iron Man against MODOK and AIM, but sadly nothing came of it.
Stan Lee had been campaigning for Marvel movies for decades, and in 1991 he saw an opportunity in Sam Raimi. "After I did Darkman, Stan Lee called me and was like, 'Hey, kid, I liked your movie,'" Raimi told The Hollywood Reporter. "He took me out to lunch and said we should work together. I said I'd like to make a movie about Thor. We worked together writing treatments and took it to Fox and pitched it. And they said, 'Absolutely no. Comic books don't make good movies.'" History would eventually prove those particular executives wrong.
Lee had rather more luck with Wesley Snipes, who was keen on the idea of a Black Panther movie. Snipes had grown up loving Black Panther in the comics, and he became tremendously excited about the idea of playing T'Challa. Snipes has suggested his film would have been thematically similar to Ryan Coogler's 2018 hit, but he hit practical problems because the filmmaking technology just didn't exist to make Wakanda. Compounding the problem, Snipes struggled to pitching Black Panther as a superhero film rather than a story about the civil rights movement, and some potential directors even blended the two.
Back in the '90s, Marvel clearly realized Doctor Strange had the potential to be a supernatural horror hit. Stan Lee teamed up with Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas screenwriter Alex Cox in 1990, and the film was almost made by Regency Studios. Unfortunately, they had a distribution deal with Warner Bros. at the time, and Warner was ill-disposed to Marvel due to a merchandising dispute. As a result, Doctor Strange was shelved for a couple of years, until accomplished horror writer-director Wes Craven and Savoy Pictures began work on a script in 1992. No doubt the Craven script was a true horror, of the kind the modern MCU would never embrace, but sadly it has never leaked.
Back in 1991, director Quentin Tarantino briefly considered making a Luke Cage movie starring Laurence Fishburne as the Hero of Harlem. Tarantino recently explained:
There was a time before all this Marvel shit was coming out... It was after Reservoir Dogs, it was before Pulp Fiction, and I had thought about doing ‘Luke Cage.’ Growing up I was a big comic-book collector, and my two favourite [comic books] were Luke Cage: Hero for Hire, later Luke Cage: Power Man, and Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu.
Unfortunately he wound up in a heated debate with some fellow comic book fans, who insisted Fishburne was the wrong man for the job, and Luke Cage should instead be played by Wesley Snipes. Tarantino moved on to make Pulp Fiction instead.
A film student named Erik Fleming had approached Marvel back in 1989, seeking permission to make an innovative CGI Silver Surfer movie. He spent the next few years creating a short, 5-minute film as a proof of concept. It was demonstrated at the First Look USC Film Festival on September 21, 1991, and studios initially expressed interest. Nothing ever came of it.
Deathlok is a cybernetic super-soldier who, in most incarnations, originated from a dystopian future timeline. No surprise, then, Marvel commissioned Randall Frakes — involved in Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day — to work on a Deathlok script. Nothing is known about this project, and it never seems to have gotten anywhere.
The Hulk's cousin, She-Hulk, is soon to enter the MCU in a Disney+ TV series. But in the early '90s, she almost became star of her own She-Hulk movie. Larry Cohen was signed up as director, and he recruited action star Brigitte Nielsen to play the Jade Giantess. Promo shots showed her in full makeup, showing a rather more muted approach than the comics. There's no evidence the project ever got beyond the scripting stages.
The Fantastic Four are considered Marvel's First Family in the comics, but they've had a troubled history on the big screen. In fact, the first-ever Fantastic Four movie was actually completed, but never released; Avi Arad, newly-hired as the head of Marvel Films, feared it would damage the brand. Ironically, he first heard about Fantastic Four while on holiday in Puerto Rico, because a fan saw him wearing a Fantastic Four shirt and excitedly chatted about the movie. Directed by Oley Sassone, Fantastic Four starred Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood, and Michael Bailey Smith. It was as low-budget as they come, shooting with borrowed cameras on a soundstage in the Venice section of Los Angeles, and Avad bought up every copy he could and destroyed them. It still leaked, and copies are still circulating online.
Marvel faced near-bankruptcy in the '90s, as a result of the comic book bubble bursting. As a result, the publisher became desperate to sell the film rights to its characters, and in 1997 there was a burst of activity. Some of this actually led to some successful movies — New Line Cinema launched the Blade franchise, with the X-Men and Spider-Man soon appearing on the big screen as well. Marvel entered into discussions with Philip Kaufman to make a Namor: Sub-Mariner movie, and by 1999 he was attempting to persuade Sam Hamm to write the script. Nothing came of it.
The tongue-slavering symbiote finally starred in his own solo film in 2018, but New Line Cinema was working on a Venom movie all the way back in 1997. Not much is known about the 1990s Venom film, with David S. Goyer writing a script in which the Venom symbiote came to Earth in an asteroid — an idea lifted from the popular '90s Spider-Man: The Animated Series. To get around Spider-Man's absence, Goyer imagined the symbiote coming from a planet of giant spiders, explaining why he had a spider insignia on his chest. The producers hoped to get Dolph Lundgren would sign on as the star, whose name was tweaked to Eddy Brock (rather than Eddie). Carnage was the villain, although this version was blended with another Spider-Man foe, the Sin-Eater.