Kraven the Hunter
During the lead-up to the release of Kraven the Hunter, the film’s quite good director JC Chandor (Triple Frontier, Margin Call) and quite good lead Aaron Taylor Johnson (Tenet, Nosferatu) seemed to plead with audiences to come see the movie, promising, implicitly, that it would not be like those other bad Sony Spider-verse movies.
You may guess what happened next.
Kraven is in fact terrible, at least according to the early reviews in that put it at a 14% Rotten Tomatoes score. Sony has said that Kraven is the end of this attempt at a villain-centric Spider-Verse, as they move on to an actual Spider-Man 4 and more Into the Spiderverse. But this whole thing as ended as easily the worst run of films in superhero movie history. We now have:
- Venom (2018) – 30%
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) – 58%
- Morbius (2022) – 15%
- Madame Web (2024) – 11%
- Venom: The Last Dance (2024) – 41%
- Kraven the Hunter (2024) – 14%
Kraven
You can argue that critics were wrong about at least a couple of the Venom movies, as they were goofy fun that went unappreciated. But after Venom made a ton of money, the idea that people wanted more random Spider-villains without Spider-Man showing up led to disaster. Morbius and Madame Web became global memes, and while I was dying in theaters with how terriblee Madame Web was, to the point where it was a very fun experience. The film, of course, bombed. Kraven the Hunter, meanwhile, does not even seem silly enough to become a meme, and will likely just get ignored with these reviews and little appeal even to Spider-Man fans.
The idea here was to make Kraven some sort of poacher-killing anti-hero, and to set up Last Hunt, the best comic Kraven story. But this wasn’t even the best portrayal of Kraven in the last year, as PS5’s Spider-Man 2 had the character as a main villain who was much closer to the comics and way more engaging.
It is clear what Sony’s original plan here was, to assemble some sort of Sinister Six where hopefully they would get their own Spider-Man eventually to take them on, be that Maguire, Garfield or Holland. But this can only go so badly for so long, and here we are, death by Kraven.
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