Stan Lee's Reaction To Sam Raimi's Spider-Man CGI Almost Made A Producer Cry

It's hard to imagine, but there used to be a time when making a superhero movie was seen as a big gamble. Yes, we had Tim Burton's "Batman" and Richard Donner's "Superman," but after Joel Schumacher's Batman films became a laughing stock, the genre looked like it was dead in the water.

Enter: Sam Raimi. The horror director had already made a name for himself as the gonzo auteur behind the "Evil Dead" films, with a penchant for launching the camera through the air at incredible speeds while jumping between humor and horror like an Olympic athlete. So when Sony Pictures brought him on board to bring Spider-Man to the silver screen for the very first time, no one was certain it was going to work.

Among those who were skeptical was Stan Lee, the man whose name is synonymous with Marvel comics. Getting Lee's approval was a critical test of the film's viability. If Lee didn't like what he saw, they wouldn't stand a chance with the real fans, and producer Avi Arad shared a hilarious anecdote about Lee's reaction to seeing "Spider-Man's" CGI for the first time that nearly brought him to tears.

Nowadays, the mechanics of bringing a visual effects heavy film to life are well known: the director will take the script and work with the visual effects team to put together a rough version of the scene that includes rudimentary visual effects to give a sense of what it will all look like before they go through the laborious practice of rendering all the action.

Reviewing these "pre-visualization" cuts of the film is a crucial part of the process because any notes that are given can be more easily addressed before the visual effects team starts getting their hands dirty, and so producer Avi Arad made sure to share this early cut of the film with Stan Lee. Unfortunately for Arad, he'd failed to prepare Lee for what he was going to see, which led to a hilarious moment that Arad called "one of the greatest moments" of making the film:

"[I] was showing Stan Lee for the first time the CGI of Spider-Man flying. I'm looking at him, and he was like an uncle, you know? And he whispers in my ear, 'That's it?' And then I realized he doesn't know it's pre-viz. He was new to the technology side of things. He was so disappointed! I almost cried!"

Stan Lee was already an old man by the time "Spider-Man" went into production, and the visual effects process was still in its infancy back in the year 2000, so it's no surprise Stan Lee didn't realize this was just a rough cut of what the film would look like. Luckily for the team behind "Spider-Man," they were able to convince Lee that everything would work out:

"I said, 'Stan, the world's never seen anything like it.' 'Yeah, but it doesn't look cool.' I told him, 'Don't worry. It will be great.' Anyhow, when he saw it finished, he had a bunch of tears in his eyes, because that's his baby."

The rest is, as they say, history. "Spider-Man" became the biggest superhero film of all time, thanks in part to its groundbreaking visual effects that, as Arad had described, the world had never seen before. And while Lee might never have fulfilled his dream of getting to play Spider-Man's greatest hater, J. Jonah Jameson, at least Raimi and company were able to give his baby the blockbuster treatment he deserved.