‘Kraven the Hunter’ concludes Spider-Man’s universe of villains in the most grotesque and ridiculous way possible

Few remember it, but the Spider-Man Universe of Secondary Characters (or UPSS, as we have liked to call it throughout these fun years) began ten years ago, with a song by Alicia Keys and a trailer for X-Men: Days of Future Past. In 2014, The Amazing Spider-Man 2: The Power of Electro concluded to the rhythm of It’s On Again of the American singer, with a sequence of credits where we observed the uniforms and gadgets of characters like the Green Goblin, the Vulture, Doctor Octopus or, of course, Kraven the Hunter. The idea with this montage was to open mouths for the next premiere of The Sinister Sixan upcoming film focused on the alliance of Spider-Man’s main villains. A film that never existed.

X-Men: Days of Future Pastin return, would hit theaters a couple of months later: the inclusion of that trailer with Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique was only due to a deal between Sony and the now-defunct Fox. Marc Webb had committed to direct a film for the latter after the success of (500) days together. Instead he had directed two Spider-Man films for Sony with Andrew Garfield, so as compensation, this conglomerate had offered Fox free advertising for its next X-Men film. It’s that simple. Of course, after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was speculated with a crossover of the wall-crawler and the mutants, because that has been the norm in superhero cinema since then: a fan fervor in constant dialogue with shabby and rugged corporate logic, of which the UPSS is the clearest proof.

As Amazing Spider-Man 2 disappointed at the box office there was no The Sinister Six. Instead, Sony gave the rights to the character to Disney so that two years later, from the scene of the airport Captain America: Civil WarSpider-Man could begin to appear in the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each film directed by Tom Holland would then be a co-production of Sony and Disney, according to a very delicate balance of rights that would henceforth cause some clashes between companies – in 2019, after the premiere of Spider-Man: Far From HomeSony briefly threatened to remove Holland from the MCU—in conjunction with some very prestigious animated films (the ones from A new universe) and, finally, the happy UPSS.

The UPSS, by the way, has just ended. Kraven the Hunter It is his last installment, as has been revealed by the US media just two days before the film is released. Sony does not want to feign hope that this saga will come to fruition, remembering when in December 2023 Jason Momoa admitted that the DC Universe “wasn’t looking good” and Aquaman and the lost kingdom It was going to be the end of him (waiting for whatever James Gunn does). The UPSS has had a somewhat shorter history, for its part. Kraven the Hunter It is only the sixth film after Morbius, Madame Web and the trilogy of Venomand we could say that it is the worst of all if that, at this point, could mean something.

Hollywood is a jungle (shabby)

Sony’s negligence regarding Kraven the Hunter It is obvious beyond the fact that he does not want to dedicate many ceremonies to saying goodbye to his universe in the shadow of the UCM. In the US, only 2,000 theaters have been scheduled to show the film — 1,000 less than Venom: The Last Dancereleased just two months ago—and when the Comic Con Experience was held last weekend in Brazil, the panel of Kraven the Hunter Neither the stars nor even the public attended. The Wrap echoed these illustrative efforts, as well as the words of a source close to Sony: “The biggest problem in this saga is the lack of quality control.”

“The movies are just not good. And sometimes that lack of quality has to do with stories that no one asked for, like Madame Web”. The film starring Dakota Johnson decided at the beginning of 2024 to do something unprecedented in the superhero genre: dispense with a post-credits scene and advance new adventures of its characters. It didn’t matter how contradictory it was for this particular film—devoted to a protagonist who saw the future and several women destined to be Spider-Women—since there was too much palpable evidence that the UPSS was doomed. If the first Venom It wouldn’t have made so much money — $856 million in 2018 — perhaps the thing wouldn’t have made as much money, but it did. And its sequels have also earned it, maintaining the gangly appeal of Tom Hardy’s character and his symbiote.

Outside Venom There just hasn’t been that luck. No one has been able to replicate that complicity or, rather, that joyful nihilism that Hardy’s gaze conveyed – surely aware of the absurdity of everything since he was able to see the first cut of Venom— and with which JC Chandor had to deal at the beginning of 2022. At that time we were assured that Bad Bunny was going to star The Dead for Sony, the signing of Donald Glover as a certain Hypno Hustler was about to happen, and Morbius It was going to be released in a matter of months. Needless to say, today not even The Dead neither Hypno Hustler have prospered, and Morbius It is the most iconic failure (by dint of memes) in recent years.

At that moment Chandor did what he could according to what was intended to be the most suitable step for his career. Like so many other names lost in the superhero tangle, Chandor is a filmmaker who triumphed in independent circles—his first two films, Margin Call and The most violent yearare excellent—and that perhaps I would have continued on that path if Hollywood were a slightly more functional place. This is not the case, and although Kraven the Hunter finished filming in those months, the film has been postponed again and again. Its first tentative date was January 2023, and it finally arrives when everything has collapsed and there is no desire to even examine whether this continuous delay has been due to the feared reshoots. That is, the recording of new scenes after the initial filming.

Of course Kraven the Hunter It has an abominable finish. The staging is as incompetent as usual in the UPSS, this sloppiness being even more egregious in terms of the digital effects. Due to the particular characteristics of the protagonist – played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in his third superhero character after Kick Ass and the Quicksilver of Avengers: Age of Ultron—, it is necessary that enough wild animals appear in Kraven the Hunterand the level of its CGI is even lower than that of a recent film like Gladiator II.

Along the same lines, the possible additions to what was recorded only point to liters and liters of digital blood, in order to justify the only distinctive element of Kraven the Hunter compared to the films that precede it: there is a lot of violence, along with a pretension of adult entertainment that reinforces the outdated air of the proposal, and takes us back to the superhero cinema of the 2000s.

Goodbye UPSS

It’s a beautiful thing in a sense. During its eventful history, the Sony saga has had to deal with the distressing absence of Spider-Man — condemning each film to a preventive existential crisis for handling characters associated with the wall-crawler— because of his activity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, controlling to what extent his plots could expand. Isn’t it beautiful, then, that the UPSS films and especially Kraven the Hunter want to resemble the primitive superhero cinema of the 2000s, prior to the premiere of iron man? Don’t its demolition CGI, its measured violence, its adolescent darkness acquire an endearing character?

The short answer is no, because Kraven the Hunter It is above all a very bad film, but also revealing in its disorientation. It distances itself from Marvelite machinery because of precisely what that person from Sony said: there has been no quality control. Which has implied the lack of standardization, of a model on which to work, and it happens that Kraven the Hunter It is surprising from several angles. The adult tone not only emanates from that very fake blood, but also from a central drama that tells us about an abusive father (Russell Crowe), and how his eldest son tries to separate himself from his shadow (the aforementioned Kraven) while protecting his son. his traumatized little brother (Fred Hechinger as Dimitri, seen in the aforementioned Gladiator II).

This does not imply that Kraven the Hunter It works dramatically, far from it, but it does not stop inserting itself into unprecedented murky coordinates, which above all transmit unpredictability. Which helps, above all, that there are so many characters in Kraven the Hunterand that its presence is not due to having a more prominent role in the future (because there is no such future). Its presence is reduced to Kraven the Hunter and to project the plot in chaotic directions, more than capable of provoking hilarity. Ariana DeBose, who won her Oscar for West Side Story with the check Kraven the Hunteris the one that comes out worst, but the circus around it is memorable.

Assuming the expected nonsense of Crowe with his offensive Russian accent, Kraven’s adventures revolve around Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) as the grotesque central villain. But he must also deal with the Stranger (Christopher Abbott), a mercenary whose powers are never made clear in the film, and with the presence of the Chameleon, who is none other than his aforementioned brother. Hechinger’s character offers another layer of eccentric sympathy to the film, since the Chameleon was the first Spider-Man villain ever to appear in the cartoons, and here he barely uses his metamorphic powers apart from… imitating the voice of singer Harry Styles.

The two hours of Kraven the Hunter They continually teeter on the brink of implosion, stumbling in increasingly humiliating ways to the point where it’s hard to get angry with them. The film seems so overcome by circumstances, so condemned to suffer the attacks that we prefer to spare ourselves with Marvel Studios, that it aims to deserve some compassion, and there are even avenues to cling to in the face of hypothetical claims. Especially now that the saga ends, and the laughter at the expense of Kraven the Hunter They barely quell an ominous unrest. Because outside of this absurd saga there is only standardization. Outside of the UPSS, that UPSS that we end up missing and everything, there are only multiverses and Deadpool.

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