oduction Development Immediately after finishing Spider-Man, director Sam Raimi with help from James Keltie segued into directing a sequel. In April 2002, Sony hired Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to write a script of the film. On May 8, 2002, following Spider-Man's record-breaking $115 million opening weekend, Sony Pictures announced a sequel for 2004. Entitled The Amazing Spider-Man, after the character's main comic book title, the film was given a budget of $200 million and aimed for a release date of May 7, 2004. The following month, David Koepp was added to co-write with Gough and Millar. In September 2002, Michael Chabon was hired to rewrite. His draft had a younger Doc Ock, who becomes infatuated with Mary Jane. His mechanical limbs use endorphins to counteract the pain of being attached to his body, which he enjoys. When he injures two muggers on a date, this horrifies Mary Jane and in the resulting battle with Spider-Man his tentacles are fused together, and the fusion begins to kill him. In the script, Octavius is the creator of the genetically-altered spider from the first film, and gives Peter an antidote to remove his powers: this means when Octavius is dying with his tentacles, he wants to extract Spider-Man's spine to save himself. This leads to an alliance with Harry (a detail which made it into the finished film). Beforehand, Harry and the Daily Bugle put a $10 million price on Spider-Man's head, causing the city's citizens to turn against him. Raimi sifted through the previous drafts by Gough, Millar, Koepp and Chabon, picking what he liked with screenwriter Alvin Sargent. He felt that thematically the film had to explore Peter's conflict with his personal wants against his responsibility, exploring the positive and negatives of his chosen path, and how he ultimately decides that he can be happy as a heroic figure. Although the story takes some partial influence from Doc Ock's debut in 1963 and the 1966 storyline If This Be My Destiny...!, the story was mostly inspired by the 1967 storyline Spider-Man No More!, specifically The Amazing Spider-Man #50. It was decided that Doctor Octopus would be kept as the villain, as he was both a visually interesting villain who was a physical match for Spider-Man, and a sympathetic figure with humanity, accompanied by the fact that the character had been repeatedly considered as a villain for the first film over the course of its 15-year development. Raimi changed much of the character's backstory, however, adding the idea of Otto Octavius being a hero of Peter, and how their conflict was about trying to rescue him from his demons rather than kill hi