After three delays that postponed its premiere by two years, Kraven the Hunter finally arrived in theaters on Friday.
Directed by J.C. Chandor and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kraven the Hunter is the origin story of the master hunter and longtime Spider-Man villain. After young Sergei Kravinoff (Taylor-Johnson) gets mauled by a legendary, hunter-killing, CGI lion—not Mufasa, I think, but who can say for sure—on a safari hunting trip led by his mob boss father (Russell Crowe), Sergei is on the brink of death. But due to a combination of the lion’s blood entering his bloodstream and a dose of a magical potion, gifted to him by a young girl who happens to find him while on a safari trip of her own, Sergei survives and is transformed. He gains superhuman senses and animalistic abilities, boasting eyesight so impressive that he can spot a cigarette on the ground while standing many stories above it. He becomes capable of scaling walls at absurd speeds and ripping doors off of moving vehicles. His eyes even glow in the dark sometimes, and he can possibly communicate with animals—but that last part is a little unclear. Kraven uses these gifts to hunt the worst criminals on the planet, including a Russian mercenary (Alessandro Nivola) who kidnaps his younger brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger).
In other words, Kraven the Hunter is another absurd Spider-Verse movie from Sony—and reportedly the final one. According to The Wrap and its insider sources, Sony’s decision-makers have “developed what they want to develop for now” and will instead turn their attention to the next Spider-Man film that they’ll coproduce with Marvel Studios. (Don’t worry, we’re still getting Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse; Miles Morales’s animated adventures just exist in a cinematic Spider-Verse of their own.)
To honor what could be the final entry in this misbegotten spider-centric cinematic universe, which somehow never featured Spider-Man himself (beyond a minor cameo in a Venom: Let There Be Carnage mid-credits scene), I’ve teamed up with Ringer fact checker Kellen Becoats to try to make sense of the spiritual sequel to Madame Web, which we tried to decipher in February. This time, we even met up in person to witness this momentous event on the big screen together. —Daniel Chin
Chin: Kellen, I am calling upon you again to discuss the latest—and apparently last—entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. We can mourn the conclusion of this cursed experiment of a franchise in a moment, but I want to start things off the same way we opened our discussion of Madame Web. I think we can both agree that Kraven the Hunter is another bad Spider-Verse movie that decidedly does not feature Spider-Man. The film currently boasts a 15 percent critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, just barely rising above Madame Web, and it posted a lowly $11 million box office opening—one of the worst-ever figures for a film featuring a Marvel comic book character.
But just how bad is Kraven? Are there enough redeeming qualities for it to achieve the status of a Good Bad Movie, or did the older gentleman in our row make the right choice by walking out of the theater with about an hour left in the film?
Kellen Becoats: Shouts to my elderly seat neighbor—we should have followed him out. It’s hard to get a proper Good Bad Movie these days because it seems like a lot of the candidates are intentionally written poorly or the actors are purposely leaning into campiness. Let me be clear: Russell Crowe tried to show up for this movie. Aaron Taylor-Johnson (and his weird, here-now-gone-next-scene accent) really seemed like he wanted this to work. But there are just too many fundamental structural problems that tear this thing down.
But we were supposed to be talking about positives. I guess some of the action was well choreographed, and we got to see ATJ with his shirt off a couple of times. Do you have any other positives to take away from this 127-minute-long eyesore?
Chin: Well, there’s definitely enough absurdity in this one for it to be a worthy successor to Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance, but I don’t know that I’ll be recommending the film to anyone until it’s available as in-flight entertainment. At the very least, Crowe’s Russian accent and pretty much every acting choice that Alessandro Nivola made as the Rhino were consistent sources of entertainment for me.
What with Kraven rocking his comic-book-accurate ’fit and really flexing his abs to end the movie, Crowe’s Nikolai Kravinoff getting mauled to death by a CGI bear, and Kraven sniffing out the infidelity of some random guy who was leaving a restaurant with his wife, there are plenty of WTF moments in Kraven that make this another entertaining disasterpiece from Sony. Which was your favorite?
Becoats: The whole way Kraven gets his powers is my favorite WTF moment. It truly has it all. We get the Magical Negro grandma who gives a mystical, don’t-think-too-hard-about-it potion to Calypso. And guess who just so happens to be passing by the exact spot where a lion has decided to dump Sergei after the boy tried to spare the animal’s life? Through some more magical yada yada, we see the lion’s blood enter Sergei’s body and start to mix with his cells. Somehow, this process, combined with the potion that Calypso gives Sergei—whom she doesn’t know before she finds him lying (and dying) in the middle of the Ghanaian plains—turns the boy into Kraven. This transformation is brought to us by a montage that looks like the old Zoobooks commercial would if you watched it at 2x speed after dropping acid.
How does this make sense? Which part gave him the powers, the potion or the blood? Should I care? Does the lion secretly have abs just like ATJ? The people demand answers! And those questions only multiply when you start thinking about our many baddies.
Chin: And there were a lot of villains in this movie. In addition to Nikolai and the Rhino, there was the so-called “Foreigner,” an obscure Spider-Man villain who appeared with a sparse backstory and always counted to three before slowing down time to kill his enemies. And in a much more understated way, Kraven’s younger brother, Dmitri—who does a mean Tony Bennett impression—transformed himself into the Chameleon at the end of the movie through the magic of science. (Sony appeared to be setting up a potential Kraven sequel built around the better-known Spidey villain, but it seems extremely doubtful that such a film will ever come to fruition.)
That doesn’t even include Ariana DeBose’s Calypso, another Spider-Man adversary who happens to be Kraven’s romantic partner in the comics. (She’s sort of a love interest in the movie as well but only in the sense that there is some vague sexual tension that is never acknowledged by either party.) So, out of all of Kraven’s villains, who do you think stole the show? And what did you think of the narrative decision to go with four(ish) villains for Kraven to face?
Becoats: It feels like they settled on one villain early on in the writing process and then couldn’t stop themselves from adding another and another … and another. We end up with four villains who get varying amounts of backstory and little to no motive to be Kraven’s enemies. The Foreigner was running around like a fairytale villain and had maybe a dozen lines, so he can count himself out as a main baddie. Nivola and Crowe are both doing excellent work—especially my boy Maximus, who strikes a balance between being a toxically masculine scumbag and a captivating hunter—but neither gets enough screen time to steal the show. And giving Dmitri the powers of a jabberjay crossed with a discount Mystique means he gets an “N/A” from me in the antagonist category.
I truly think that if they had just made this a revenge story where Kraven has to save his little bro from their criminal mastermind father, this movie might have worked. It also might have helped if the Rhino had been introduced earlier instead of halfway through the movie, after a 30-plus-minute flashback to establish the brothers’ backstory. What we get instead is a lot of clumsy line reading, confusing plot decisions, and unsatisfactory deaths for three-fourths of our villains. The laugh we both let out when the CGI bear took out Crowe made it totally worthwhile, though. As you mentioned, making Dmitri into the Chameleon seemed to be setting up possible sequels that our universe won’t be seeing (probably to our benefit). It’s wild that the same corporation that’s giving us some of the best Spider-Man content we’ve ever had is also capable of putting out these incomprehensible snorefests. Now that Sony’s live-action Spider-Verse is evidently defunct, what are your thoughts on the universe(s) it created?
Chin: Well, here’s how I would rank the live-action Spider-Verse movies:
- Venom
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage
- Venom: The Last Dance
- Madame Web
- Kraven the Hunter
- Morbius
The Venom trilogy is in a league of its own. Venom is a true Good Bad Movie, a film that was so bizarre and absurd that it gained a cult following despite being panned by critics. From Eddie Brock’s ace investigative journalism to Tom Hardy jumping into a lobster tank on a whim, the movie is uniquely silly and unhinged in a way that may never be replicated in cinema—but Sony tried to replicate it in each successive Spider-Verse film, with diminishing returns.
Let There Be Carnage recaptured some of that chaotic energy by adding Andy Serkis as its director and Woody Harrelson to its cast, but in The Last Dance, the Venom franchise became too self-aware for its own good. The third and final film in the trilogy is in on the joke and tries too hard to deliver crowd-pleasing moments that reference its own mythology (such as the scene in which Mrs. Chen reemerges as a high roller in Las Vegas to do a dance sequence with Venom). The Last Dance also sorely misses Michelle Williams’s Anne Weying and features an embarrassingly bad villain in Knull, who looks like he’s been transported from a PlayStation 2 cutscene to deliver convoluted exposition and little else.
Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter attempted to channel that Venom chaos magic, but each one failed in its own perplexing way. It really wouldn’t take much to convince me to reconfigure the back half of this list in any order, but Morbius sits at the bottom for having the least interesting protagonist in Jared Leto’s Dr. Michael Morbius. The best and perhaps only notable thing the film has to offer is Matt Smith’s performance as Milo, specifically his unforgettable dance scene:
How would you rank these movies?
Becoats: I definitely think you’re right in saying that the Venom movies stand above the others. There’s just enough camp and symbiote nonsense throughout that series to give the movies some momentum and let you laugh along with the silliness. Ranking the rest of these is so hard, because each is so bad in its own unique way.
I think Madame Web has to be at the bottom. The plot is nonexistent, the audio is so indecipherable that it led people to google what “ADR” was, and every single artistic choice felt like a joke that the audience wasn’t in on. I’ll put Morbius over Kraven strictly because the studio got duped by trolls into rereleasing the former, and it flopped a second time. It’s honestly impressive that they’ve fit so many of the worst comic book movies of all time into such a short period.
Chin: It really is incredible that, in the same six-year span, Sony has gifted us with two phenomenal Spider-Man movies that have inspired a shift in the animation industry while also giving us six different Spider-Verse films that are varying degrees of bad. (And, again, somehow none of them incorporate Spider-Man beyond a minor cameo.) Here is the final tally of every live-action Sony Spider-Verse film’s critics scores on Rotten Tomatoes, audience-fueled CinemaScore, and box office performance:
Although the Venom trilogy raked in a lot of cash and deservedly received the highest marks of the bunch, that is an impressive collective commitment to mediocrity for a group of big-budget films from a major Hollywood studio. It’s also an indication that one of Sony’s primary objectives with these movies was to simply produce “Spider-Man” movies at a steady rate so that Spidey’s film rights wouldn’t revert back to Marvel. As The Ringer’s Miles Surrey wrote in February (and as The Ringer’s Joanna Robinson explained on NPR’s Planet Money in 2022), Sony’s deal with Marvel requires the studio to begin production on a new “Spider-Man” film within three years and nine months of the release of the preceding movie and to then release it within five years and nine months. There are only so many Spider-Man movies you can make at any given time, so the studio decided to take this half-baked villain route instead of exploring the origin stories of Aunt May and Uncle Ben. (Although I’m sure the latter possibilities were considered at some point.)
Regardless of why these movies exist, Sony’s live-action Spider-Verse leaves behind a legacy of memes, overused comic book tropes, and one heartwarming romance between Tom Hardy and some alien goo from outer space that loves to eat brains. Sony releasing three terrible superhero movies in one calendar year certainly hasn’t helped mitigate the overwhelming sense that superhero fatigue is here to stay. The Last Dance just finished setting up Sony’s own Avengers-like crossover, with Knull being teased as this superhero universe’s answer to Thanos, but it seems as if the studio is finally calling it quits and sparing us from (or depriving us of?) what would have been a chaotic antihero team-up for the ages.
As long as Miles Morales’s story concludes as planned with Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and we eventually get a Spider-Man 4 with Tom Holland, I can’t claim that this cinematic universe will be missed. But just as Eddie Brock said to his fallen symbiote pal/lover while at the Statue of Liberty, set to the sweet, somber tunes of Maroon 5, at the end of The Last Dance, “I won’t forget you, buddy.”
