With less than a week to go until Kraven the Hunter arrives in theaters, excitement still seems relatively muted among fans. Sony Pictures tried to increase interest by releasing the first 8 minutes, and while the preview received a mostly positive response, it was also quickly forgotten after dropping early on Monday morning.
GamesRadar+ recently caught up with director J.C. Chandor and lead star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and the filmmaker hyped up the Marvel movie's "spectacular" stunts.
"There was a sort of a relentlessness to the character that we both picked up on. He just never seems to give in. I really wanted the stunts, right from the beginning of designing them, to have a reality to them," he teased. "You can kind of get away with doing anything right now with the technology that we have, so it's about almost limiting what the character can do."
"And then you've got this guy [referring to Taylor-Johnson]. He's just a physically gifted performer. That's a lump of clay that you can do a lot of pretty cool stuff with!"
Johnson added, "I think also a hard R [rating] meant that we didn't need to hold back," he said of the movie that's been handed a rare "18" rating in the UK. "We were trying to fit it in that box and then it was just like, we've got to unleash this character and do him justice. They allowed us to make it an R, and we definitely pushed the boundaries!"
"It sounds weird to say it, but the R-rating allowed us to do some things," Chandor noted. "There's a history of mental illness. You're gonna see a couple things that happen here, where you're like, 'whoa' that actually refers more to the way these kids were brought up."
Despite that, the actor would go on to say, "I think at the core of the story, there's a real family drama. You see these two boys being brought up in a very toxic environment. Their father is this Russian gangster, the head of this mobster gang, and eventually he wants to hand the business over."
Sergei Kravinoff, however, isn't interested in becoming a gangster. "That kind of sends my character down this journey of becoming a vigilante, and his path to being a villain."
None of this sounds particularly comic-accurate, though it does sound like Kraven's relationship with his brother Dmitri (the supervillain known as Chameleon in the comics) will be front and centre.
"He is the only thing he [Sergei/Kraven] cares about and wants to protect with all his life, but I think ends up getting caught up in everything [that] might put him in harm's way, and he has to live with that," Johnson reveals. "And so there is a real strong heart and soul to this story."
Sony, Taylor-Johnson, and Chandor appear oblivious to the fact this isn't what fans want from Kraven the Hunter. There's been a very vocal demand to see him battle Spider-Man on screen since the mid-2000s, but a gangster origin story...well, that's arguably the wrong direction to take this villain in on so many levels.
Kraven the Hunter arrives in theaters on December 13.