Sony Pictures' Spider-Man Universe has not been well-received by fans. While there's no denying the success of the Venom franchise, those movies aren't particularly well-liked and Morbius and Madame Web were both critical and commercial disasters.
One of the biggest issues is how many liberties with the source material the studio continues taking. Kraven the Hunter is a prime example of that, with a completely reimagined origin story for the villain, including a penchant for hunting gangsters and a mutant Rhino. Oh, and the notable lack of Spider-Man.
Talking to ComicBook.com, Kraven the Hunter director J.C. Chandor said he understands that "the audience obviously takes the foundational elements of the canon here really seriously – and so did we."
He added, "I think we wanted to always be servicing the movie and making a great movie that can stand on its own. And you don’t have to come into this really knowing anything. But if you do, I also wanted to take that really seriously."
"One of the fun things about signing up for one of these movies is you’re getting to try to take these, you know, generations of canon and actually take the best of it for your story and do something fascinating with it. So in our version of Kraven, I hope people will see that we’ve gone all the way back to the origin," the filmmaker continued.
"I don’t want to go too into much of the details with some of the other characters in it, but the Rhino, Calypso, certainly Chameleon – we took that same balance where even though we’ve maybe tweaked some things and updated them, it’s the spirit from those original books."
Chandor concluded by saying, "I think if you know that canon and you give us a chance, you’ll see that we’re trying to build off the spirit of that original document."
There's a strange air of desperation surrounding Kraven the Hunter's marketing campaign; from Chandor's pleas for fans to give the movie a chance to that 8-minute sneak peek, the director has now resorted to teasing future plans for Spider-Man.
"Certainly for Aaron [Taylor-Johnson] and I, 'Kraven’s Last Hunt' was our North Star, basically," he told the site. "So the character that we created, you know, if everyone comes out and supports the film and we get to keep telling this story, that is where we were heading towards. When people get a chance to see the whole film, I think they’ll see that we were very serious about what we were trying to do."
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.
The cast also includes Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, and Russell Crowe.
Kraven the Hunter arrives in theaters on December 13.