Kraven The Hunter’s Alessandro Nivola talks critical reception and not knowing what went wrong with the movie

Sony’s solo Spider-verse continued to stumble despite being six movies deep with three Venom movies and entries like Morbius, Madame Web and the recent Kraven The Hunter. When Kraven flopped, Sony Pictures CEO, Tony Vinciquerra, blamed critics when he said, “For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”

Kraven‘s story has been criticized for being a mess and the end result can usually be traced to studio interference and too many cooks in the kitchen. However, one of the film’s stars, Alessandro Nivola had nothing but good things to say about his experience on the film and doesn’t know what happened creatively with Kraven. In a new profile from The Hollywood Reporter, Nivola admitted,

I really don’t know what happened behind the scenes. On these kinds of movies, you hear about all the wranglings at the studio, and maybe there were too many chefs. I don’t know. I don’t know enough about what the process was beyond just my experience of being on set, which was really joyful.” 

Nivola would testify that he was given some creative free reign on the project, “Kraven was as creatively playful and fulfilling a time for me as a lot of other movies have been, and so I didn’t have any sense of there being problems behind the scenes. But a lot of that probably starts to play out in the edit with all the different opinions about it, so I really couldn’t tell you. All I know is that I had a great time filming it.”

The actor who portrayed Rhino in the movie also wouldn’t hear much from critical or fan reception as he avoids such things, “I haven’t read much of the reviews, but my agents sent me all the trades’ reviews, which were some of the best reviews I’ve ever had for anything. In fact, IndieWire wrote three pages about my performance, and so that’s nice. But I don’t really pay too much attention to critical and fan response because it can be a black hole. I went through all of that before with Many Saints of Newark. It was another situation where my performance was praised, but the movie was not.”