In fairness, they never could’ve known what was coming.
Sharing his memories of Stan Lee with THR this week, horror master Sam Raimi revealed something mighty interesting: in the early ’90s, Raimi pitched Lee on bringing Thor to the big screen, long before the Marvel Cinematic Universe was even remotely a thing. This was in 1991, but Raimi says that Fox ultimately killed the project before it really went anywhere.
“After I did Darkman, Stan Lee called me and was like, ‘Hey, kid, I liked your movie.’ He took me out to lunch and said we should work together,” Raimi recalled. “I said I’d like to make a movie about Thor. We worked together writing treatments and took it to Fox and pitched it. And they said, ‘Absolutely no. Comic books don’t make good movies.’ This was in 1991.”
Of course, it was less than 10 years later that Sam Raimi and Marvel ended up working together on Spider-Man, with Raimi directing a trilogy of films centered on the web-slinger.
A partnership that was fated to be, you could say.