No One is Kraven This

It might have come with great expectations at one point, but the Sony Universe of Spider-Man Characters (or whatever they were calling it from one week to the next) is officially dead. It started relatively strong, with the $800 Mil debut of Venom, illustrating to Sony that they could make Spider-man films about Spider-man villains without, you know, having SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002. anywhere in the film (not that Sony had to do it this way as some reports indicate Sony could have used a Spider-man, or even Tom Holland’s Spider-man, in their non-Marvel Cinematic UniverseWhen it first began in 2008 with a little film called Iron Man no one suspected the empire that would follow. Superhero movies in the past, especially those not featuring either Batman or Superman, were usually terrible. And yet, Iron Man would lead to a long series of successful films, launching the most successful cinema brand in history: the Marvel Cinematic Universe. films) and from there we then got a lot of movies no one actually wanted to watch.

Morbius was terrible. Madame Web was even worse. Two Venom sequels also followed along, with 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage and 2024’s Venom: The Last Dance each seeing diminishing returns from the original film. So many other projects were put into pre-production from the studio, from an El Muerto film starring Bad Bunny, to a Nightwatch film no one asked for, and even, of course, a Sinister Six movie, which Sony has been trying to get off the ground since Sam Raimi was directing Spider-man films. None of these are going to get made (along with a dozen other films that have also been canceled). Only one more project actually managed to reach competition: Kraven the Hunter.

Let’s be clear, this film was likely going to be bad regardless of where Sony was in their production cycle. The idea of taking characters indelibly tied to Spider-man, who often were set on their villain path because of the web-head, and spinning them out into films without their lead hero, rewriting these characters into something more of anti-heroes than actual villains, was already a pretty stupid idea from the get go. It could work for Venom because he’s one of the few Spider-man villains to actually break out and get his own ongoing series with his own fanbase. But El Muerto, Nightwatch, Jackpot, Madame Web, and the rest haven’t managed that. They aren’t beloved characters that can carry their own franchises, let alone even a single solo movie. Kraven is no different.

The fault here doesn’t rest with the people on screen. I don’t fault Aaron Taylor-Johnson for taking the lead role in this film or committing to it hard. The dude had dreams of turning this into a franchise, with two sequels planned and so much more he wanted to do. It’s clear the guy loved this character (at least the version he got to play who, as we’ll discuss, is nothing like the comic book character) and had big ambitions. He, and his co-stars, do what they can in a film that was poorly conceived, poorly executed, and then hobbled by extensive edits and reshoots. This was a film that was never going to succeed not just because it’s Kraven the Hunter but also because it’s a Sony superhero film. There was simply no getting over that hump.

But at the same time it didn’t have to be this bad. Kraven the Hunter isn’t just a stupid movie, although it is. It’s not just a film desperately in search of a hero to help balance out its hollow anti-hero taking up the central figure of the film. The biggest issue with Kraven the Hunter is that it’s boring. For all its action, for a central performance that tries, for all the money that Sony poured into this production (upwards of $130 just on filming, and that doesn’t take into account advertising and other expenditures), the film is dreadfully dull. It never rises to the occasion, or even manages to be passably fun. It’s just a boring movie.

We’re introduced to Kraven (Johnson) already on the hunt, pretending to be a prisoner on a Russian convoy, going to a Russian prison where, presumably, he’d be kept for the rest of his life. Except, Kraven is there to stalk a specific guy, an arms trafficker who, through his actions, has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The trafficker thought himself untouchable, safe in the Russian prison where he paid off all the guards, but Kraven proves otherwise, killing him and his men before he easily escapes back out into the tundra. This is what he does: he’s a hunter who hunts bad guys, and his business is good.

As we learn, Kraven got his powers during a hunting accident. Back then he was just Sergei Kravinoff (played as a younger man by Levi Miller), the older of two sons to criminal kingpin Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe). Nikolai was a big game hunter, and he took his two sons, Sergei and Dmitri (played as a lad by Billy Barratt, and as an adult by Fred Hechinger) out to the Serengetti to hunt lions. One lion, though, attacks Sergei, slashing him up and dragging him off, but a young woman, Calypso (played as a teen by Diaana Babnicova, and as an adult by Ariana DeBose), finds him and saves his life, in the process accidentally giving him super powers. Now an adult, Kraven hunts people like his father, and he’ll need the help of Calypso to get a really bad man, Aleksei Sytsevich aka the Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), that wants him dead.

To be clear, Kraven the Hunter has way too much backstory for such a slight film. It spends a long time reinventing Kraven’s backstory, changing how he gets his powers and what he does with them. A good superhero backstory informs who he will be when he rises up, with his powers and abilities often coming in a way that enhances his character arc. Kraven, though, doesn’t actually have a character arc. His powers come, more or less, by mistake. It’s a twist of fate, a random act of chance. Sure, he uses them to essentially be the opposite of his father, but he doesn’t really become a superhero because of this. He runs away to escape his father simply because, and you get the feeling he would have done this whether he suddenly had super powers or not.

A lot of what happens in the film follows similar logic. The Rhino wants to kill Kraven because, apparently, Kraven has a list and if you’re on his list you die. Instead of Kraven deciding it was time to kill the Rhino, Rhino comes for him first. This might seem logical, but doing it this way means there’s no personal connection between our hero and our primary antagonist. The villain doesn’t come about because of Kraven’s actions. Hell, until Rhino comes for Kraven (and, instead, ends up kidnapping Kraven’s brother) our hero doesn’t even know he exists. The two barely share screen time for most of the film, and this is supposed to be the central power dynamic that fuels the film. It doesn’t work.

Better is the relationship between Kraven and Nikolai, if only because these guys actually share screen time and have some kind of connection built in. Father against son is a solid hook upon which to hang a story, and that would be the case here if we had any reason for Kraven to hate his father beyond, “he’s overbearing and mean.” We are told Nikolai is a bad guy, a criminal kingpin that runs drugs and trafficks weapons, but we’re not actually shown any of this. Nikolai is just a guy that sits behind a desk and talks a big game. If the film gave him the criminal empire of the Rhino, and had him actually do the things Rhino does, that would make him into a villain worthy of the film. Instead we end up with two halves of a villain separated into two characters, one with the actions of the villain, the other with the backstory, and it waters everything down.

And this is to say nothing about how bloated the film is with other characters. Calypso is supposed to be Kraven’s magical right hand woman, but she’s barely in the film at all, used only as a prop when the film has to explain something. The Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) is introduced as this deadly assassin with a mind control special power, but he inserts himself into the story, seemingly just because, and then doesn’t actually do much to further the plot. He’s just there to give Kraven one more person to kill. But then, really, the same could even be said about Rhino, who is barely a concern in the film for which he’s also the primary antagonist.

Kraven the Hunter doesn’t work. Its story is a mess, its characters are worse, and it would be completely unwatchable if all the actors in the film weren’t trying their best with an incomprehensible plot and unintelligible dialogue. Crap happens simply because the film needs it to, without rhyme or reason being factors. Characters are introduced, perform one function, and then die off because that’s what the script demands. There is no logic to anything that occurs, with Kraven running around killing people and chasing bad guys simply because that’s all there is for him to do in the movie.

The end result is a story that didn’t need telling because there’s barely anything in the film that actually matters. By the time you reach the end of the film, and everything is explained to you (not that you naturally figure it out, but that the film literally has to stop dead to explain everything you just watched) all you can feel is tired. This film wears you down, constantly running around for no reason until everyone falls over and the hero is successful. It never gives you a reason to care. Hell it never even musters the energy to try. This is a film that didn’t need to happen, and Sony should have realized that long before a single scene was shot.

Its greatest, enduring legacy will be that this is the film that finally squashed Sony’s ambitions for their own Spider-man-without-Spiderman shared universe. Hate Kraven the Hunter all you want (and it’s easy to do so, for sure) but at least it did us that one solid favor. And for that, we are all grateful.