Audiences continue to remember Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy fondly, despite its flaws. 2002's Spider-Man helped to redefine the superhero genre in cinema, set a standard for supervillains -- at least where Spidey is concerned -- for future adaptations to follow and finally, helped to bring the romance between Peter Parker and Mary-Jane Watson to a wider audience.
Screenwriter David Koepp recently revealed that his original idea for the Spider-Man trilogy featured a very different story, one that focused on Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. In an interview with Collider, Koepp stated, "Basically [my trilogy idea] was the telling of the Gwen Stacey/Harry Osbourne story," adding that the story would have been spaced out across three films, "I wanted Gwen to be killed in the middle of the second movie, because that follows sort of the Empire Strikes Back model, and I had different villains I wanted to use." The screenwriter did not specify which villains he had intended.
Koepp then revealed that Sony's Amazing Spider-Man films provided another opportunity for him to return to his original vision. He stated, "I was excited to come back and try to finish the story I started telling in the first one," but went on to express that the creative motivation was lacking, "I thought, 'Boy, you can't go home again. That moment has passed. The time when I was really feeling it was 10 years ago, and there's no point in trying to recreate it.' So I bailed."
In Sam Raimi's trilogy, Gwen Stacy did appear in Spider-Man 3, but her role was limited and she was only briefly involved with Peter Parker. The Amazing Spider-Man reboot series featured Stacy as a notably prominent character. She was killed off in Amazing Spider-Man 2, with a death scene that somewhat resembled the demise of her comic book counterpart.