Kraven the Hunter is now playing in theaters but it wasn't always the plan for the villain to get his own movie in Sony's Spider-Man Universe.
What you might not realise is that Marvel Studios hoped to use the character not just in its Spider-Man franchise (which is produced in partnership with Sony) but Black Panther as well. In fact, filmmaker Ryan Coogler hoped to put Sergei Kravinoff front and centre in T'Challa's first solo outing.
"Being a Marvel fan, you want to grab all the characters," he said shortly after Black Panther's release in 2018. "You realise there’s contractual things. You don’t have that character. There was a Christopher Priest run that was pretty heavy, there’s a big scene where Panther’s fighting Kraven, Kraven the Hunter."
"I’ve always loved Kraven the Hunter in almost every iteration. So there was a moment – ‘Can I grab Kraven?’ – and they were ‘Nah, you don’t have Kraven.’ He was one where I thought 'Oh, man,'" the filmmaker continued. "But I don’t even know if he would have worked in the movie we ended up with, this was the early days."
At the time Black Panther was being developed, Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures' deal was in its infancy and Kraven the Hunter was seemingly off-limits to Coogler simply because Kevin Feige and company didn't have access to him.
However, slightly more concrete plans for the villain were put in place a few years later for Spider-Man: No Way Home. With the wall-crawler's secret identity revealed to the world, Jon Watts planned to bring Kraven to New York City where he'd have hunted down the fugitive teenager.
"For a long time, there was going to be a Kraven movie that was going to be the third movie because things weren’t working out and all sorts of different stuff. Jon pitched me this Kraven movie, which actually was cool," Tom Holland revealed in 2021.
The threequel eventually became a Multiversal epic but there's a good reason Kraven didn't factor into the story. According to writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, it was made clear to them that the character was "unavailable until Sony established him in a solo movie."
As a result, Kraven the Hunter robbed us of the chance to see Earth-616's Kraven the Hunter alongside the rest of Spider-Man: No Way Home's villain. Alas, with the movie set to flop this weekend, it's unlikely Marvel Studios will revisit the character in Spider-Man 4 or beyond, putting him - and a possible Kraven's Last Hunt adaptation - on the shelf for now.
Kraven the Hunter is now playing in theaters.