Tom Cruise and James Cameron Nearly Cameoed in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had a lot of cameoes and Easter eggs, but one that didn’t happen involved Tom Cruise and James Cameron. Yep, really. Speaking with /Film, scriptwriter Rodney Rothman said that at one point in the script he almost put in a scene that would have brought Cameron and Cruise into the movie.

The set-up is a touch convoluted, but it goes like this. Tom Cruise very nearly played Peter Parker in a Cannon Films take on Spider-Man in the 1980s. And James Cameron developed a film based on the character in the mid-1990s that also fell apart, although Sam Raimi incorporated some of Cameron’s elements into his film. And the film does make reference to the actual films that were made, such as one point where, as Rothman says, “There’s a line from Doc Ock that’s a very direct reference to Doc Ock’s most famous line in Spider-Man 2.”

Rothman goes on to say that the subplot would have involved Miles learning how to be Spider-Man not from a comic book, but from watching an audio commentary featuring Cruise and Cameron: “There was a movie version of a movie about Spider-Man in Miles’ universe about the real person Spider-Man, but it was a James Cameron-directed movie with Tom Cruise as Spidey. Yes. Spidey. And it was James Cameron and Spidey and Tom Cruise on the audio…and guest star real Spider-Man.”

Obviously, that never came about, and as Rothman says, “The fact that it’s taken us almost three minutes to explain this idea to you, it gives you an idea of why it didn’t make it in.”