In an age when superhero movies dominate the box office and any comic book property is considered a hot commodity in Hollywood, villain-centric movies are becoming more and more common. While Disney owns Marvel and Warner Bros. owns DC, Sony has been trying to get its foot in the superhero cinematic universe door with Spider-Man characters alone.
The studio has practically been holding Spidey for ransom to allow Kevin Feige to continue to include him in the MCU’s movies, and it’s determined to give just about every supporting character from a Spider-Man comic book their own solo movie. After the success of Venom, Sony has gone all-in on its Spidey villain universe, verbosely dubbed the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters.
In addition to a Venom sequel on its way for a September release, Sony is working on movies centered around Morbius the Living Vampire, the Sinister Six, and Kraven the Hunter. The Kraven the Hunter movie is officially moving ahead with Triple Frontier’s J.C. Chandor on board to direct and Avengers: Age of Ultron’s Aaron Taylor-Johnson cast as Spidey’s big-game-hunting nemesis.
While Sony is determined to test the theory that anything bearing the Marvel brand will become a box office hit, villains headlining their own movies makes little to no sense. Great villains are defined by their relation to the hero. This is particularly true of Spider-Man, whose rogues’ gallery is made up mostly of his acquaintances and non-Uncle Ben father figures.
On top of that, despite insisting on giving villains their own movies, Hollywood studio executives won’t allow the lead character of a tentpole blockbuster to be unlikable, so they recharacterize them as heroes, or at least tragic, misunderstood figures (like Maleficent). This makes their characterization messy in the larger canon and inevitably leads to baffling creative choices like the revelation in Disney’s Cruella that Cruella de Vil’s mother was shoved over a cliff by Dalmatians.
The whole point of a villain is to create obstacles and conflicts for the hero. They shouldn’t take center stage as the hero themselves, because they’re not equipped to do it. The $1 billion success of Todd Phillips’ Joker movie might suggest otherwise, but Phillips’ Joker is essentially the Joker in name only. Arthur Fleck is a wholly original creation that happens to use the clown motif. Phillips deliberately avoided adapting any specific comics and instead characterized his Joker as a Scorsese vigilante in the mold of Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. The Joker of the comics is primarily defined by his co-dependent relationship with Batman and how his chaotic nature clashes with the Bat’s own meticulous nature, which was captured brilliantly by Christian Bale and Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight.
Sony’s first Spidey villain movie, Venom, worked because the character is sort of an antihero as opposed to a straightforward villain and there’s enough conflict with Eddie and Venom’s Jekyll-and-Hyde dynamic to sustain its own movie without any connection to Spider-Man, but Kraven the Hunter is pretty clearly defined by his connection to the webslinger. He’s a big-game hunter who prides himself on tracking down and killing the most difficult prey to track down and kill. When Spider-Man becomes New York’s protector, zipping around on webs and beating up criminals twice his size, Kraven determines him to be the ultimate prey, and so he sets out to hunt him down. It’s as simple as that. A Kraven the Hunter story that doesn’t involve Spider-Man is pointless.
The Kraven the Hunter movie would work a lot better if it did revolve around Spider-Man, but told the story from Kraven’s perspective. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man would appear in the fringes of the plot as the movie focused on Kraven choosing the right weapon to kill him with and figuring out his location or his secret identity (which could also tie into Far From Home’s identity reveal twist). Since Sony is keeping plot details scarce, this might actually be what the Kraven movie is about, but it seems unlikely. It’s more likely that Sony will tease that Spidey could appear in the Kraven movie right until it hits theaters and fans buy their tickets and realize he isn’t in it and it’s just another generic, unnecessary supervillain origin story.
Some of the greatest movies of all time have featured an evil, corrupt, deplorable “protagonist,” from The Godfather to Raging Bull to There Will Be Blood, but the SPUMC doesn’t seem capable of producing a movie of that caliber. It’s possible that Sony has a great idea for the Kraven the Hunter movie. The script has been rewritten by Iron Man’s Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, so it seems to be in safe hands (although they also wrote Transformers: The Last Knight and Men in Black: International, so maybe it’s not). We’ll just have to wait and see when Sony’s Kraven the Hunter movie hits theaters on January 13, 2023.