Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train) plays the title character in the forthcoming film Kraven the Hunter.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) got off to a strong start with Venom (2018) and Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), both of which racked up high box office earnings despite mixed-to-negative reviews from critics. But then the studio foundered badly with a couple of box office flops: 2022’s Morbius and 2024’s Madame Web.
Sony hopes to right the ship with a third Venom film in October (The Last Dance) and the much-delayed Kraven the Hunter this December. We’ve got a new trailer for the latter, leaning heavily into R-rated gore and set to Johnny Cash’s moodily atmospheric “The Man Comes Around.” It’s an entirely different, darker vibe from prior offerings: a revenge narrative rife with violence and daddy issues. Color us intrigued.
Comic book fans are well acquainted with Kraven as one of Spider-Man’s most formidable foes, a founding member of the Sinister Six. He’s a Russian immigrant with an aristocratic background who fled his home country when Tsar Nicholas II’s reign collapsed in 1917. He’s a big game hunter with enhanced abilities thanks to ingesting a mysterious potion made from jungle herbs. He’s very hard to injure, has super-human strength, and enhanced sight, hearing, and smell, as well as being a good tactician with excellent hand-to-hand combat skills.
Screenwriter Richard Wenk has said that Sony intended to adapt the critically acclaimed 1987 storyline in Kraven’s Last Hunt by J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck, and Bob McLeod, which leaned heavily into the character’s Russian origins to create a very Dostoyevsky-like arc of a tortured soul. That storyline features an older Kraven whose health is failing who decides to hunt Spider-Man one last time, whereas the film is clearly an origin story. And Kraven actually dies by suicide in that comic arc, but we’re guessing Sony has plans to use him in other SSU films, with or without his arch-nemesis Spider-Man.
Per the official premise:
Kraven the Hunter is the visceral, action-packed origin story of how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
In addition to Taylor-Johnson and Crowe, the cast includes Ariana DeBose as the voodoo priestess Calypso, Kraven’s love interest; Fred Hechinger as Dmitri Smerdyakov, aka Chameleon, Kraven’s half-brother; Alessandro Nivola as Aleksei Sytsevich, aka Rhino, a Russian mercenary who can transform into a human/rhino hybrid; Christopher Abbott as a mercenary and assassin called the Foreigner; and Levi Miller as young Sergei.
Kraven the Hunter hits theaters on December 13, 2024.
Listing image by YouTube/Sony Pictures
