Sony’s Marvel Comics adaptation Kraven the Hunter is set to reach theatres on December 13th. This movie is, along with Morbius, Madame Web, and the Venom trilogy, part of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (which was formerly known as the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters), which consists of Marvel adaptations that doesn’t have the creative team of Marvel Studios behind them, so therefore they’re not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony is able to make these films because they own the movie rights to all characters that were originally introduced in the pages of Spider-Man comics. The financial success of the Venom movies aside, these movies haven’t tended to go over well with movie-goers – and the film’s director, J. C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) recently asked that people give Kraven the Hunter the chance to wash away the bad taste left by Morbius and Madame Web. Now, Sony’s marketing department has taken the step of dropping the film’s opening 8 minutes online in an effort to convince audiences that this movie will be worth going to see. You can watch those 8 minutes in the embed above.
The film is believed to have a running time of 127 minutes, so Sony is still keeping 119 of those minutes under wraps.
Directed by Chandor from a screenplay by Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway, Kraven the Hunter is the action-packed, R-rated, standalone story of how one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless gangster father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the title character and is joined in the cast by Ariana DeBose as voodoo priestess Calypso Ezili, Fred Hechinger as Kraven’s estranged brother and master of disguise Dmitri Smerdyakov / Chameleon, Alessandro Nivola as Russian mercenary and human-rhino hybrid Aleksei Sytsevich / Rhino, Christopher Abbott as a mercenary and assassin known as the Foreigner, and Russell Crowe as Kraven’s estranged father, the ruthless crime lord Nikolai Kravinoff.
Taylor-Johnson, who is rumored to be in the running to play James Bond, recently recommended the film to fans of the Bond franchise as well.
Are you looking forward to Kraven the Hunter, despite the bad reputation of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe? What did you think of the opening 8 minutes? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.