After seeing Kraven the Hunter in theaters in December 2024, I couldn’t cease fascinated with 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 finances, nevertheless it’s the form 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 acquired animal powers by consuming a voodoo potion.
My problem right here isn’t about accuracy to the supply materials, to make certain. It is technically true that Kraven acquired his powers of enhanced energy and velocity 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” form of month.) However most trendy comics politely don’t point out it, as a result of, , 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 criticism is about accuracy, in a roundabout manner. 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 is likely to be one of the best instance of how that restricted temporary was prioritized over different good and apparent decisions.
In the event you had to decide on considered 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 spite of everything, he’s nearly 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 title Sergei Kravinoff) is only a Marvel adaptation of Common Zaroff from Richard Connell’s seminal 1924 quick story “The Most Harmful Recreation,” 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 Recreation” had already impressed a number of free or direct diversifications in movie, radio, and tv by the point Lee and Ditko debuted Kraven in 1964’s Wonderful Spider-Man #15. The story of a person with immense sources who makes use of them to pursue his terrifying want to hunt individuals like they had been trophy animals had already turn into a normal trope in midcentury journey fiction, a lot in the identical manner the battle royale has made a giant splash in trendy motion films and TV: It was a helpful construction for presenting quite a lot of resonant metaphors. Kraven himself was only one aspect of the bigger trope — or a pure continuation of it into the superhero sphere, nonetheless you wish to have a look at it.
And Kraven stays one of the crucial versatile villains in Marvel Comics. Historically, Spider-Man is his nemesis, however in precise apply, he’s been pitted towards nearly all people. 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 probably 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 position 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 an alternative of a cranium.
I don’t suppose 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 mentioned they had been indebted to J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck’s defining 1987 crossover Kraven’s Final Hunt, and hoped that they may sooner or later get to adapt that traditional story.
However that was all the time 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’s 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 all the time be a two-legged stool with out the webslinger.
However alternatively, it’s equally tough 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 alternative 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.
Picture: J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck/Marvel Comics
And that, I feel, is on the coronary heart of the voodoo potion selection. In the event you’re making a Kraven film the place he doesn’t have a rivalry with Spider-Man and he’s not even a villain, possibly you have to maintain the voodoo potion. Possibly, when you’ve modified virtually all the pieces concerning the character to intention at an ill-fitting temporary as an alternative 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 guide 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 collection 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 loads more durable to make a 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 incredible film out of Kraven the Hunter. The issue is that there are a ton of how, and Sony nonetheless picked this one.
Kraven the Hunter (alongside Madame Net and Venom: The Final Dance) is streaming on Netflix now.