Before Sam Raimi successfully brought Spider-Man to life, and helped to launch an entire genre of movies which are still going strong today, there had been many attempts at bringing the web-slinger to the big-screen. One person who had attempted to develop a SPIDER-MAN movie was James Cameron, and although the project eventually fell apart, there was one major element which survived to be featured in Sam Raimi's version.
While speaking with IGN, SPIDER-MAN writer David Koepp touched upon how James Cameron's treatment was very influential, for several reasons. As the majority of comic-book films up until that point hadn't always taken their characters seriously, Koepp was touched by just how seriously Cameron's treatment took Peter Parker.
[Cameron's] treatment, it just took it seriously. It took Peter seriously as a character and it took a superhero movie seriously as a genre. And you hadn't seen that before. This was 2000 and 2001 when I was writing (Spider-Man) and there hadn't been a good superhero movie since probably the second Batman. X-Men was still yet to come.
In addition to James Cameron's demand that Spider-Man be taken seriously, David Koepp took one other idea from Cameron's treatment – Spidey's organic web-shooters. "He had some very good ideas in it," Koepp said. "I like the organic web-shooters, which some people liked and some people didn't, but that was his idea and I was happy to use it." I do reall a bit of an outrage about the organic web-shooters when SPIDER-MAN hit theaters, but I didn't mind them; plus, the mechanical web-shooters would eventually make a return in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN as well as Spidey's introduction to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.