Chris Columbus Nearly Directed Tobey Maguire's SPIDER-MAN
Here's a weird piece of trivia: apparently filmmaker Chris Columbus was close to directing Sony's Spider-Man movie in 2000 before it eventually went to Sam Raimi.
Heroic Hollywood noticed that director Joseph Kahn (Torque, Detention, Power/Rangers) answered a fan question on Spring.me about how he was originally in talks to direct a Transformers movie for the studio years ago, he offered the following story:
The late '90s and early 2000s were a totally different time in the movie news world. The community wasn't nearly as fractured as it is today, and there wasn't rampant reporting about every stage of development or casting wish list. And remember, superhero movies weren't even that popular at the time; there were others before that, but Bryan Singer's X-Men really kicked things off in a major way back in 2000.
I'm sure there were a ton of directors and actors who were up for these early comic book movie properties that we haven't heard about, but I for one am glad that Raimi ended up getting this job over Columbus. This was right before Columbus directed the first two Harry Potter films (widely considered the weakest of the franchise), and ultimately he's spent the past fifteen years directing some pretty disappointing movies. This obviously would have changed his career in a major way, but Raimi's vision was just so perfect for those early superhero movies. We'll probably never know what Columbus' film might have been like.
Of course, Jon Watts is directing Sony and Marvel's new Spider-Man reboot (which will be the second in a decade), and that film arrives on July 28th, 2017.