Kraven the Hunter's first trailer is really just a Rhino delivery system
Sony has every reason in the world to want to keep building out its own cinematic universe of superhero features around Spider-Man, his amazing friends, and the villains that want to kill him, but the first trailer for director J.C. Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter movie doesn’t exactly inspire hope for what the studio’s dropping next.
Rather than giving the nerds what they want and just pitting its titular big game hunter against Spider-Man, Kraven the Hunter will tell the dark and rather tragic story of how Sergei Kravinoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) became a psychopathic leather enthusiast with a taste for human blood. In Marvel’s comics, Kraven’s known as something of a fashion-forward criminal who — in addition to murdering Spider-Man — is obsessed with proving that he’s the world’s preeminent apex predator. Some of that story’s bound to be the same here, but in the new trailer, Kraven’s introduced first and foremost as a man who’s still struggling to deal with the psychological damage inflicted upon him and his brother Dmitri Smerdyakov (Fred Hechinger) by their abusive father (Russell Crowe).
The trailer details how it’s Kraven’s father’s insistence that they’re superior to other people that first puts the boy on his dark path as a teenager following the death of his mother. What truly seals the deal, though, is a fateful accident (being mauled by a lion and exposed to its blood) during a hunting trip somewhere in Africa that leaves him profoundly changed. Kraven’s trailer doesn’t entirely make it clear just what all Kraven can do with his superhumanly enhanced senses and strength, but all of his hunting, maiming, and evisceration of other people all appears to be in pursuit of his father, whose own line of business “puts evil in the world.”
Despite his clearly enjoying killing people for personal reasons, the movie’s Kraven seems to think of himself as a kind of antihero, which voodoo practitioner Calypso (Ariana DeBose) rightfully clocks as a red flag. But judging from the way the trailer spotlights Kraven brutalizing people, biting off their noses, and showing off his abs, the movie kind of wants you to think of him as an antihero as well, which might be a sign that it’s going to put a bit too much energy into downplaying just how much of a villain he is.
That being said, the brief glimpse of Aleksei Sytsevich’s (Alessandro Nivola) hand going all rough and rhino-like suggests that Kraven himself won’t be the only classic Spider-Man foe to appear in the film, and if the Rhino’s running around, it means that Kraven the Hunter might at the very least have some interesting world building to do when it hits theaters on October 6th.
