Kraven the Hunter clarifies the main flaw of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe

After seeing Kraven the Hunter in theaters in December 2024, I couldn’t cease excited about one element of the film. Kraven’s arrival on Netflix this week — its debut for the streaming viewers — introduced it again to the forefront of my thoughts. Kraven was an enormous box-office flop, scoring round $60 million worldwide on a $110 million manufacturing price range, nevertheless it’s the type of flop that sparks morbid curiosity. This weekend, many, many Netflix subscribers will pop this flick onto their televisions or second screens, and discover out that there was a superhero film in 2024 the place a white man on a visit to Africa received animal powers by ingesting a voodoo potion.

My subject right here isn’t about accuracy to the supply materials, to make sure. It’s technically true that Kraven received his powers of enhanced energy and pace from a potion he stole from an African “witch physician.” (It was 1964, in his first look, and I suppose Stan Lee and Steve Ditko had been having an actual “broad stereotypes” type of month.) However most fashionable comics politely don’t point out it, as a result of, you already know, using “voodoo” as shorthand for “jungle magic” is racist. To not point out an actual tonal swerve for a film making an attempt to be extra Japanese Guarantees than Indiana Jones.

However then once more, possibly my grievance is about accuracy, in a roundabout approach. Sony’s interconnected cinematic universe of Spider-Man-less Spider-Man films (Morbius, Madame Net, the Venom films, and now Kraven) had been born of a mandate to bend secondary comics characters into new molds as self-serious heroes or antiheroes in superhero action-thrillers. Kraven the Hunter may be one of the best instance of how that restricted transient was prioritized over different good and apparent selections.

If you happen to had to decide on certainly one of Spider-Man’s out-and-out villains to carry down his personal film franchise, Kraven is about as adaptable a personality as you may get. In any case, he’s virtually not even initially from Marvel’s comics.

Within the grand custom of nice concepts that Stan Lee borrowed and polished up with superhero garments, Kraven (full identify Sergei Kravinoff) is only a Marvel adaptation of Normal Zaroff from Richard Connell’s seminal 1924 brief story “The Most Harmful Sport,” the origin of the saying that man is probably the most harmful prey for a hunter to subdue. Zaroff is the villain of the piece, an aristocratic Russian big-game hunter who contrives to hunt unwilling human victims on a personal protect for his personal enjoyment.

“The Most Harmful Sport” had already impressed a number of unfastened or direct diversifications in movie, radio, and tv by the point Lee and Ditko debuted Kraven in 1964’s Superb Spider-Man #15. The story of a person with immense assets who makes use of them to pursue his terrifying need to hunt folks like they had been trophy animals had already turn out to be a basic trope in midcentury journey fiction, a lot in the identical approach the battle royale has made an enormous splash in fashionable motion films and TV: It was a helpful construction for presenting a wide range of resonant metaphors. Kraven himself was only one aspect of the bigger trope — or a pure continuation of it into the superhero sphere, nevertheless you need to have a look at it.

And Kraven stays one of the versatile villains in Marvel Comics. Historically, Spider-Man is his nemesis, however in precise apply, he’s been pitted towards nearly everyone. Creators could make him hunt Black Panther or Captain America, and even make him shut, private pals with Squirrel Woman. He’s a wonderfully environment friendly hook as a result of he’s actually only a gentle reskin of a broader trope that’s been utilized in works as tonally disparate as Gilligan’s Island and Prison Minds. And it’s not like villains can’t anchor a film franchise — simply have a look at the horror style. Kraven and the Predator are the identical archetype.

However even when handed a doubtlessly common boogeyman, Sony’s mandate was to cram him into acquainted framing: a morally questionable hero of an action-thriller set in a world largely with out superheroes. The filmmakers took the man whose iconic function is searching harmless human beings for sport till a hero triumphs over him, and made him the Punisher with a lion head motif to his shirt as a substitute of a cranium.

I don’t assume that is essentially as a result of the oldsters behind Kraven, or different Sony Spider-Man films, don’t see the potential that the supply comics revealed in these characters. Each Kraven actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Kraven director J.C. Chandor have stated they had been indebted to J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck’s defining 1987 crossover Kraven’s Final Hunt, and hoped that they could in the future get to adapt that traditional story.

However that was at all times going to be a tall order within the construction of Sony’s Spider-Man Movies With out Spider-Man (previously “SPUMC”), contemplating that Kraven’s Final Hunt is a narrative about Kraven dropping his marbles after years of losses to… Spider-Man. He hunts down, subdues, and buries the wall-crawler alive so he can don Spidey’s costume and act out his crime-fighting duties whereas sustaining his personal brutal searching strategies. On the finish, Kraven feels so personally fulfilled by defeating Spider-Man and (in his eyes) efficiently doing the hero’s job that he releases Spider-Man and takes his personal life. He’s an Alexander with no extra worlds to overcome.

Given all that, there may be merely no eradicating Spider-Man, and his prolonged preestablished rivalry with Kraven, from Kraven’s Final Hunt. And Taylor-Johnson and Chandor aren’t the one Sony Spider-Man figureheads who appear to know that the franchise will at all times be a two-legged stool with out the webslinger.

However alternatively, it’s equally troublesome to think about a narrative during which Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven — a grim grownup man who turned his again on his crime-lord household and devoted himself to murdering probably the most difficult-to-find criminals of the world — sees the defeat and substitute of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, a peppy 17-year-old do-gooder, as an act so personally fulfilling that he would take into account it his life’s crowning achievement.

And that, I feel, is on the coronary heart of the voodoo potion alternative. If you happen to’re making a Kraven film the place he doesn’t have a rivalry with Spider-Man and he’s not even a villain, possibly it’s important to maintain the voodoo potion. Possibly, when you’ve modified virtually every part concerning the character to intention at an ill-fitting transient as a substitute of a resonant replace or revamp, all that’s left of the unique property to mark it as an adaptation are probably the most extraneous, dated, and cumbersome comedian e-book particulars. Like a voodoo potion, an Amazonian spider cult, a ferociously contrived medical-experiment-to-vampire transformation, or the Venom franchise’s gradual deflation right into a sequence of comics references lashed haphazardly right into a single script.

If the precedence isn’t to make one of the best adaptation, however to make a mold-fitting adaptation, it turns into lots more durable to make a very good adaptation. With Sony’s admission that it has no present plans to proceed its Spider-Man-less Spider-Man Universe, Kraven the Hunter doesn’t simply stand as a capstone on that effort, however as one of the best instance of its flaws. The issue was by no means that there are solely a few methods to make an important film out of Kraven the Hunter. The issue is that there are a ton of the way, and Sony nonetheless picked this one.

Kraven the Hunter (alongside Madame Net and Venom: The Final Dance) is streaming on Netflix now.