During a recent interview to promote Spider-Man: No Way Home, Tom Holland revealed that after Disney and Sony Pictures parted ways, Kraven the Hunter was considered for the movie's villain. While missing out on all the Multiverse madness in the threequel would have been a terrible shame, fans probably wouldn't have been upset about getting an adaptation of "Kraven's Last Hunt," for example.
After all, with Spider-Man framed as Mysterio's killer, Kraven tracking Peter Parker down has the makings of a great movie. Now, that villain is getting his own spinoff, but Spider-Man: No Way Home writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers recently told Variety what led them to that character.
With it looking increasingly likely that Spidey's next adventure would not take place in the MCU, they had to get creative. "We were taking meetings about it, and going, ‘Well, what would this movie be if it wasn’t in the MCU?'" McKenna says. Sommers adds: "It was like any time you have a limitation thrown on you. Then it creates possibilities and spurs all sorts of creative discussions."
"Fortunately, they came to their agreement before we were too far down any road, and we were able to jump right in with the old team," he concluded.
We came close to getting a Spider-Man vs. Kraven the Hunter movie, then, but would any of us now trade what ended up in Spider-Man: No Way Home for that clash? Probably not, but even in that iteration, the writers were set to highlight the fallout from the wall-crawler's secret identity being revealed to the world. "He has to, again, struggle with what it means to be Peter Parker, what it means to be Spider-Man," McKenna notes. "It’s like therapy, talking about this stuff!"
It remains unclear whether Holland's Spider-Man will be part of two worlds moving forward, but a meeting with Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Kraven might not be totally off the cards.