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For longer than the executives at Marvel probably care to remember, Spider-Man was the best-known comic-book hero never to make the move to the big screen (though he did land on TV as the star of several animated shows, as well as a live-action 1978 series that quickly flopped). In comics-industry terms, the character is a superstar; Marvel currently publishes four different monthly Spider-Man titles that together sell as many as 500,000 copies, second only to the company's chart-topping X-Men books.

And yet, looking at Marvel's overall production slate, Spider-Man seems to be arriving in theaters more as part of the herd than as leader of the pack: X-Men 2 is due next year, as are The Hulk and Daredevil. "It's come together so incredibly," says 79-year-old former Marvel editor in chief and chairman emeritus Stan Lee, who cocreated Spider-Man with artist Steve Ditko in 1962. "Virtually every single important character that Marvel has is being prepped as a movie somewhere--and even some that are considered not that important."

But the Marvel production picture was drastically different back in 1985, when the Spider-Man rights were licensed to B-movie factory the Cannon Group for a paltry reported $250,000. And that wasn't the worst of it; by the mid-'90s, piecemeal sublicensing had instigated a six-year legal free-for-all--variously involving Sony, MGM, Viacom, and others--over who should and would get to put the character in a movie. "It was like we had to hide behind a curtain, because there were never good things to talk about," says Marvel Studios president and CEO Avi Arad, who inherited the rights tangle when he took charge of the company's Hollywood dealings in 1993.

The Spider-Man case was finally settled by MGM, Sony, and Marvel in early 1999, and a court turned down Viacom's claims for TV rights shortly thereafter. Marvel and Sony (Columbia Pictures' parent company) entered into a joint partnership on the franchise, with Marvel reportedly receiving an up-front fee of between $10 million and $15 million from the studio. Still, the entire mess had famously cost Marvel a chance to have James Cameron helm the project. Jurassic Park coscripter David Koepp ultimately crafted the Spider-Man screenplay using Cameron's extended treatment as a springboard. For a time, the production even pursued Cameron's Batmanesque idea of building the story around not one but two villains. Classic Spidey baddies Doctor Octopus and the Sandman were both tossed around during development, a process that saw Con Air writer Scott Rosenberg also take a pass at the script.

As it turns out, Raimi and Koepp adhered even more closely to Spider-Man's comic-book story lines than Cameron had planned to. The movie faithfully recounts the character's origin, in which awkward teen Peter Parker gains amazing powers after suffering a freak spider bite. While struggling to make sense of the havoc this wreaks on his life--not to mention trying to conceal his dual nature from the world--Peter forms a bond with Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe), a tech-industry mogul who's also got something to hide: He's the Green Goblin, a high-flying supervillain maniacally bent on Spider-Man's destruction.

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