Não está claro, mas em esta entrevista com Sam Raimi (diretor do Homem-Aranha 2) ele descreve a gênese da trama da perda de poder;
Embora a implicação seja que, no filme, sua perda de poder é em grande parte psicológica (o médico dá a entender que a incapacidade do Homem-Aranha de usar seus poderes vem de uma barreira psicológica e por causa dele strong falta de motivação para permanecer Homem-Aranha ) o fato é que o enredo foi inspirado na história em quadrinhos " Homem-Aranha: Desmascarado Enfim! " onde sua perda de poder é realmente o resultado de uma doença semelhante à gripe.“I was thinking about a great issue of Stan Lee’s Spider-Man comic book where he gets the flu. And he, for a time, is really weak. It was so human to me, I thought it was great. This superhero’s got the bug that affects all of us, and just like we all have to go to work when we’re sick and we really don’t know why we’re doing this and how we’re gonna do our job, he had to fight criminals when he had the flu. I thought that was incredibly human, a humanizing thing to have happened to a super hero.
It was a combination of that and a desire to put that into the picture so we could identify with him. I thought that was a unique thing that happened in Stan Lee’s comics ..... That’s where the genesis of the loss of powers came from.”
