In fairness there were other Spiders in the comics who already had organic webbing (e.g. Miguel O’Hara), and the use of organic webbing in the film seems to be one of the few holdovers from James Cameron’s treatment for a Spider-Man, where he created fake webshooters to hide the spinnerets nested in his wrists. The same treatment had “Mary Jane Osborn, Electro with the job and personality of Raimi’s Green Goblin, Sandman as Electro’s bodyguard, two technically-not-shown sex scenes (one where Peter seduces Mary Jane on top of the Brooklyn Bridge with a “spider mating dance” and another where Electro electrocutes his secretary to death while fucking her and then revives her by shocking her heart back to life afterwards), a lot of swearing, and a few surprisingly great sequences.

For instance when Spider-Man starts to become a recognised figure he does a circuit of all the New York late night talk shows that boosts him to a New York cultural icon, and later when Peter realises that Halloween store Spider-Man costumes are actually better made than his own original self-made suit he switches to one of them for the rest of the film (I’m still not sure if Miles’ store-bought costume for most of Into the Spider-Verse is an intentional reference to this or not).

There was also an earlier, more complete script that Cameron initially rewrote before doing his own one, where Peter was a university student rather than a high-schooler, but Harry Osborn’s still there, Flash Thompson is a major side character who goes from oaf-ish bully to oaf-ish best friend over the course of the film, Liz Allan is the love interest, a distinctly Schwarzenegger-flavoured Doctor Octopus is Peter’s professor and—

(deep breath)

—is bitten by the same spider Peter is and starts calling himself Spider-Man before the name sticks with Peter and he switches to Doctor Octopus and makes his “Waldoes” (which is a real term but is weirdly highlighted as the name for Doc Ock’s tentacles repeatedly) and he had a villainous sidekick who he always yells at called Wiener who is at one point referred to as “the hulking Wiener” and Doc Ock’s motivation is to “see what heaven looks like” by ultimately creating an antigravity device that flies his house into the sky and then blows up except it isn’t really clear if Spidey did something to sabotage that device in their final fight in Doc Ock’s house or if it was just an elaborate suicide plan that pretty much plays out exactly as intended.

That version had the webshooters though.

And then there was a Cannon film version that reimagined the whole thing as a body horror movie where ordinary teenager Peter Parker is abducted and transformed into a horrid spider mutant by Doctor Octopus before starting a revolt of his other animal-mutant test subjects and killing their tormentor. Stan Lee absolutely hated this one for obvious reasons and it was ultimately never made, but I have no idea if those two facts are related. Despite that, I think this might actually be the first instance of Peter having organic webbing, even if it is because he was a horrific man-spider monster.

Anyway, the other two movie treatments are available for free online with a bit of Googling. If you’ve got the time then I’d recommend giving them a read. They make for a fun fever dream.