Ugh.

So earlier this week we were….I don’t want to say treated…exposed? Yes. Earlier this week we were exposed to the trailer for “Kraven the Hunter”, another Spider-Man villain movie without Spider- Man like “Morbius” and “Venom” that nobody asked for.

This movie is another attempt at Sony to hold onto the rights of Spider-Man and his section of the Marvel universe for cinematic adaptation by releasing another entry in their Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), which currently has no Spider-Man.

Why are they bothering with these solo ventures for characters that traditionally work best when acting as foils for Spider-Man when they have a perfectly good Spider-Verse series of animated films going on?

Money obviously, but surely they can’t expect this to do well following the disaster that was “Morbius”, that movie amounted to nothing more than some memes, and I really can’t see “Kraven” being any different.

I suppose we should start with some background on Kraven.

Born Sergei Kravinoff, he was a Russian immigrant and son of an aristocrat who fled to the United States in 1917 after the February Revolution, the long and short of which, saw Russian nobility and the monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II decimated.

Kraven is a big game hunter, but unlike rich dentists, he like to hunt his prey with his bare hands. He decides to hunt Spider-Man to prove himself the world’s greatest hunter. Kraven has a bit of an honor system, always making sure that his game is hunted fairly.

To match Spider-Man, Kraven consumes a serum made from various jungle herbs that grant him incredible strength, speed, and heightened senses. It was also retconned to slow his aging process, which is why he can be nearly a century old (depending on when said story is published due to Marvel’s sliding time scale).

Kraven is also the halfbrother of another Spider-Man villain, the master of disguise Dmitri Smerdyakov aka The Chameleon, who first hires Kraven to hunt Spider-Man.

Kraven would eventually go on to become a founding member of the Sinister Six alongside Doctor Octopus, Vulture, Electro, Mysterio, and Sandman. Then he would kind of act as a rather uneventful villain for much of his history until his most celebrated story: “Kraven’s Last Hunt”.

It was in this story that Kraven supposedly finally killed Spider-Man, actually only drugging the Wallcrawler

Comically Serious

with a powerful tranquilizer, and then took his place over the course of two weeks to prove himself the superior Spider-Man by capturing a foe that Spider-Man himself couldn’t defeat alone.

After proving his superiority, Kraven then commits suicide….

Calley Lamar

only to be brought back by later writers because God forbid we have stories with lasting consequences (well except for the Uncle Ben and Gwen Stacy stuff, those two generally stay dead unless we’re dealing with multiversal variants).

“Kraven’s Last Hunt” elevated the character for many readers since it provided some interesting insight into his psyche and sort of retroactively made Kraven a favorite for many comics fans.

The movie…doesn’t appear to be doing any of that.

The movie’s version of Kraven seems to get his powers from being mauled by a lion (suddenly a spider bite doesn’t seem so bad), additionally, it seems that he is Kraven “the Hunter” in the sense that he hunts people. So less your typical big game hunter and more General Zaroff from “The Most Dangerous Game”, and maybe a little less egregious, but Kraven doesn’t even sound Russian in the movie. In fact, I’m pretty certain Aaron Taylor- Johnson’s accent seems to change throughout even just the trailer itself.

The trailer also seems to indicate we’re getting both Kraven’s brother (jury’s out on if he become the Chameleon) a version of The Rhino, another Spider-Man villain that seems to be here to fill the Russian Spider-Man characters quota.

This was initially going to be about Kraven itself, but I soon found I had a lot more to say about Sony’s bizarre choice to make movies about Spider-Man adjacent characters, and not involve their own Spider-Man, or assume anyone would be interested.

Now both “Venom” films managed to make money, which was probably a given considering the symbiotes have always been popular characters (and I use characters in the loosest sense of the word), but let’s look at what is coming up in this slate of films aside from “Venom 3”.

- Madame Web - El Muerto - And an untitled Hypno-Hustler movie Ugh. Venom I understand, Morbius has had his own series and could work as well, Kraven even has some interesting stories in the comics to pull from, but you’re telling me someone thought Hypno-Hustler could headline a movie.

Someone wake me up when the Stegron the Dinosaur Man, or Big-Wheel movie gets announced. At least those might be more interesting than what Sony has announced/done thus far.

Honestly, I’ve already seen “Morbius”, and I’m not looking forward to watching the same movie, but swapping out bats for lions.

Dasvidaniya Kraven!