Spoiler alert: If you haven't seen or played the new Amazing Spider-Man movie or game yet, don't read any further. Seriously.
Remember all those The Amazing Spider-Man promos? The ones that teased something mysterious lay in Peter Parker's past, specifically the fates of his long-dead parents? It sure seemed like the newest movie reboot of Marvel's flagship character was going to change Spider-Man's origin story, making Peter Parker's powers the result of prior experimentations on his genetic code rather than a spontaneous mutation from a random radioactive spider-bite.
An article at Badass Digest suggests that there's a whole untold story regarding that subplot that got cut from the ASM movie at the last minute.
Months ago I told you guys that I heard rumors that The Amazing Spider-Man would be making a simple, but huge, change to Spider-Man's origin. No longer would the spider bite change Peter Parker into a superhero. Rather, the spider bite would activate something already within him that would make him a superhero.
This is not reflected in the final movie. Sort of. The hints of it are still there, and when you add in deleted elements that snuck into the marketing you can see the shape of the thing where it once existed.
Citing various moments in the finished Amazing Spider-Man film, the piece speculates that that a mix of cuts and reshoots try to smooth over the spots where this idea would have played out in the movie:
The last two trailers released have Dr. Connors saying, mid-Lizard transformation, ‘If you want the truth about your parents, Peter, come and get it!' What truth is that? There's no ‘truth' in the film, and Connors and Peter never have a good conversation about Peter's parents.
Beenox's ASM tie-in title picks up on the movie's plot points in very broad fashion but it's still possible to see hints of the Genetic Destiny/Untold Story threads in there, too. The game refers to the mutated animal/human hybrids—like Curt Connors' Lizard persona and the Vermin and Rhino villains—as cross-species. Peter also gets categorized as a cross-species, too, by Connors, girlfriend Gwen Stacy and the Oscorp robots he fights throughout the game.
What's weird about that element is that the game refers to cross-species as a legacy of experiments that the film barely mentions. There's only one other cross-species in evidence in the film and movie-Connors goes to great lengths to say that human trials haven't been done yet. Also, Peter's unique status as a cross-species that doesn't go all animalistic is the key to creating an antidote for the virus being spread by Vermin, Scorpion and the game's other villains. Peter has spider-powers but doesn't sprout four extra arms. The mention of a specific element in Peter's DNA that stops that from happening makes it seem like the game was meant to expound on that particular plot point from the movie.
Of course, this is all rampant speculation. But having seen the movie, it does feel odd that a major plot point that's supposed to motivate Peter Parker—his father's mysterious death and the full breadth of Richard Parker's scientific legacy—doesn't get adequately resolved. Do you think a big chunk of the Amazing Spider-Man movie got cut?