Kraven the Hunter is now available on Digital platforms, meaning you can experience Sergei Kravinoff's origin story at home. A deleted scene has just dropped to mark the occasion and, well, it leaves us with much to discuss.
It opens with the gangster-hunting anti-hero sleeping in a London park before being woken up by a police officer. British actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who uses an American accent in the movie, has what sounds like an oddly fake English accent as he attempts to convince the cop to leave him to his rest.
With that, Kraven shows off Flash-like superhuman speed as he races into action to save the office from being taken out by...a bicycle. Of course, Taylor-Johnson is no stranger to speedsters after previously playing the MCU's Quicksilver.
It's not a good scene and that's probably why it was left on the cutting room floor. The biggest takeaway is that filmmaker J.C. Chandor seemed to have little to no understanding of who the Spider-Man villain is (in fairness, he was working off a script by the Morbius scribes).
Acknowledging that Kraven the Hunter was "probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years [I’ve been at Sony]," departing CEO Tony Vinciquerra recently said, "That didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film,"
"Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment," Vinciquerra continued. "Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix."
"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," he concluded.
You can watch this new Kraven the Hunter deleted scene below.
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. J.C. Chandor directs from a screenplay by Richard Wenk and Art Marcum & Matt Holloway.
Kraven the Hunter is now available on Digital and arrives on DVD and Blu-ray on March 4.