Before the aptly named Marc Webb signed on to direct the reboot of Sony's Spider-Man franchise following Sam Raimi's trilogy, David Fincher apparently was in talks to helm the film. io9 interviewed the director about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but also got him to comment on what he would have done with his take on the wall-crawler:

My impression what Spider-Man could be is very different from what Sam [Raimi] did or what Sam wanted to do. I think the reason he directed that movie was because he wanted to do the Marvel comic superhero. I was never interested in the genesis story. I couldn't get past a guy getting bit by a red and blue spider. It was just a problem… It was not something that I felt I could do straight-faced. I wanted to start with Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin, and I wanted to kill Gwen Stacy. The title sequence of the movie that I was going to do was going to be a ten minute — basically a music video, an opera, which was going to be the one shot that took you through the entire Peter Parker [backstory]. Bit by a radioactive spider, the death of Uncle Ben, the loss of Mary Jane, and [then the movie] was going to begin with Peter meeting Gwen Stacy. It was a very different thing, it wasn't the teenager story. It was much more of the guy who's settled into being a freak.

Fincher's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo opens today, while Webb's Amazing Spider-Man premieres July 3.