One way or another, Anne Hathaway was going to ease her way into a massive superhero tent pole film. Obviously, she ended up fighting alongside Batman (Christian Bale) in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. But she almost landed a part fighting alongside Spider-Man, instead.
So says Sam Raimi, who admits to Vulture that he had tapped Anne Hathaway to play Felicia Hardy in the unmade Spider-Man 4, which fell apart in pre-production. “I didn't get to see Batman yet, because I've been working nonstop on Oz, but I hear she's great in it. I'm not surprised, because I loved what she was doing with the auditions for Spider-Man 4,” the director said.
Raimi talks candidly about being “very unhappy” with Spider-Man 3 and wanting to end on a very high note” by turning Spider-Man 4 into “the best Spider-Man of them all.” Alas, he couldn’t crack the story in time to meet the studio’s deadline, leading to what Raimi calls “the most amicable and undramatic of breakups.” The reboot plan went into effect at Sony, leading to Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man (and now, its sequel). And Raimi fans are left wondering what might have been.
You don’t have to wonder too much. Hardy, in Spider-Man terms, is the daughter of a renowned jewel thief who follows in her father’s footsteps and become a lithe, sexy cat burglar. So basically, most of what Hathaway was doing in The Dark Knight Rises as Catwoman probably would have been how she would have approached Raimi’s Spider-Man. I’d love to finally watch Rises with Raimi to see how much of Hathaway’s auditions he sees in her final Batman performance. But Raimi’s loss was Nolan’s gain, and the universe found a way to balance itself out.
