Sony Pictures' New York Comic-Con panel has just finished up, and the first 8 minutes of Kraven the Hunter was screened for those in attendance.
The footage has not been officially released (we are expecting a new trailer early next week), but a few snippets have leaked online along with a couple of new promo stills.
The opening sequence sees Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) stalking and killing multiple foes in a prison, and the violence is said to be surprisingly gruesome. A second clip was also shown, with "multiple very brutal kills" including murder by bear trap, axe, and tree stump - which reportedly splits someone straight down the middle.
"He's an apex predator, the top of the food chain," said Johnson. "Kraven's a hunter, not a poacher. Like every hunter knows, sometimes you have to cull the herd to preserve order. Of course, when he starts applying that to human beings, it becomes a pretty dark story."
“It’s not just Kraven. We’ve really gotten an opportunity to dive into the Marvel characters in a really cool way,” added director J.C. Chandor. “We wanted to have the spirit of those characters be what fans want and also bring it to the screen in a new way… We’ve walked a tonal balance where myself as a storyteller and as the director, I know the actors in every performance, we’re not breaking the fourth wall. We believe in this story like it was really happening.”
"When you get in those books. It’s pretty, pretty intense," said the filmmaker of the movie's much-discussed R rating. "When the studio gave us the opportunity to see if we wanted to do this as an R[-rated] film, we were like, yes,” he said. “It was an amazing opportunity. It sort of opened up some really intense kind of Grindhouse stuff on one side, and then some also really intense character stuff.”
Check out the new stills and footage at the links below.
“Kraven the Hunter is the visceral story about how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Set before his notorious vendetta with Spider-Man, Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the titular character in the R-rated film.”
Kraven the Hunter is an upcoming American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, produced by Columbia Pictures in association with Marvel Entertainment. Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing, it is intended to be the sixth film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU). The film was directed by J. C. Chandor and written by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Richard Wenk.
In addition to Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the title role, Ariana DeBose will play Calypso, a voodoo priestess and Kraven's on-off love interest (in the comics, at least); Fred Hechinger is Dmitri Smerdyakov, aka the Chameleon, who is Kraven's half-brother; Alessandro Nivola will play Aleksei Sytsevich, aka the Rhino, and Christopher Abbott will portray another villain known as the Foreigner.
Sony's next "SMU" movie has been rated R for "Strong bloody violence, and language."