Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the titular character, Kraven the Hunter is the next chapter in Sony’s cinematic universe of Spider-Man characters, a brand that has struggled to connect with audiences. While the Venom trilogy managed to make enough money to pay the bills, Morbius and Madame Web flopped hard, shattering the audience’s trust that Sony can deliver a good theatrical time using only Spider-Man villains while the Web Crawler is nowhere to be seen. However, Kraven‘s director J.C. Chandor is confident his movie can break Sony’s curse. In an exclusive interview with ComicBook, Chandor detailed how Kraven the Hunter approaches comic book canon and how excited he is to share his faithful vision of the titular character with fans.
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One of the main criticisms of Sony’s cinematic universe is that the movies change many of the main characters’ backstories, making them more antiheroes than true villains. These changes were needed, as removing Spider-Man from the formula forces characters such as Tom Hardy’s Venom and Jared Leto’s Morbius to take on a protagonist role and fight some more significant threat than themselves. For long-term Spider-Man fans, that also means ignoring much of what makes them complex characters in comic books.
[Related: Kraven the Hunter’s Opening Weekend Box Office Could be Lower Than Morbius]
As Chandor tells us, Kraven the Hunter tries to do something different. The director understands that “the audience obviously takes the foundational elements of the canon here really seriously – and so did we.” That’s why Chandor took upon the task of making the best Kraven solo movie possible while also respecting the character’s layered comic book history.
“I think we wanted to always be servicing the movie and making a great movie that can stand on its own,” Chandor said. “And you don’t have to come into this really knowing anything. But if you do, I also wanted to take that really seriously. One of the fun things about signing up for one of these movies is you’re getting to try to take these, you know, generations of canon and actually take the best of it for your story and do something fascinating with it. So in our version of Kraven, I hope people will see that we’ve gone all the way back to the origin.”
It’s not only the titular antihero who’ll have his comic book history pouring into the movie. In our interview, Chandor underlines that he approaches secondary characters with the same care.
“I don’t want to go too into much of the details with some of the other characters in it, but the Rhino, Calypso, certainly Chameleon – we took that same balance where even though we’ve maybe tweaked some things and updated them, it’s the spirit from those original books,” he said. “I think if you know that canon and you give us a chance, you’ll see that we’re trying to build off the spirit of that original document.”
Will Kraven Ever Fight Spider-Man in the Sony Universe?
While it’s good news that Chandor speaks passionately about respecting canon, it’s still odd to think about Kraven in a world without Spider-Man. However, Chandor does want his version of Kraven to face the Web-Slinger if he’s ever given a chance to pursue a sequel. Chandor also clearly knows where he wants to take Kraven next: Kraven’s Last Hunt, the villain’s quintessential story.
“Certainly for Aaron [Taylor-Johnson] and I, ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’ was our North Star, basically,” he said. “So the character that we created, you know, if everyone comes out and supports the film and we get to keep telling this story, that is where we were heading towards. When people get a chance to see the whole film, I think they’ll see that we were very serious about what we were trying to do.”
Kraven the Hunter will premiere exclusively in theaters on December 13th, 2024.