Sony’s Spider-Man Universe struggled commercially and critically so far mainly because of the changes made to the well-known characters’ stories and the Web Slinger’s absence. ‘Kraven the Hunter’ followed a similar path as ‘Madame Web’ and ‘Morbius’ in those regards, reimagining the central villain’s origin, adding to the criticism.
Director J.C. Chandor addressed his approach to the plotline in a recent chat with ComicBook, saying, “The audience obviously takes the foundational elements of the canon here really seriously – and so did we.”
“I think we wanted to always be servicing the movie and making a great movie that can stand on its own,” he continued, “and you don’t have to come into this really knowing anything. But if you do, I also wanted to take that really seriously.”
“One of the fun things about signing up for one of these movies is you’re getting to try to take these, you know, generations of canon and actually take the best of it for your story and do something fascinating with it. So in our version of Kraven, I hope people will see that we’ve gone all the way back to the origin.”
“I don’t want to go into too much detail with some of the other characters in it, but the Rhino, Calypso, certainly Chameleon – we took that same balance where even though we’ve maybe tweaked some things and updated them, it’s the spirit from those original books,” the filmmaker said. “I think if you know that canon and you give us a chance, you’ll see that we’re trying to build off the spirit of that original document.”
Chandor previously made a similar statement by explaining that his movie aimed to move away from some of Sony’s earlier efforts. He asked fans to give the standalone movie based on Marvel comics a chance to see its ‘pretty fun story’ that has ‘potential for a lot of things to happen.’
After that interview, talks about a possible Kraven and Spider-Man showdown started online, fueled by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s words about wanting to make it happen.
The director hinted at future plans focusing on that plotline as follows: “Certainly for Aaron [Taylor-Johnson] and I, ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’ was our North Star, basically. So, the character that we created, you know, if everyone comes out and supports the film and we get to keep telling this story, that is where we were heading towards. When people get a chance to see the whole film, I think they’ll see that we were very serious about what we were trying to do.”
Taylor-Johnson stars in ‘Kraven the Hunter,’ along with Russell Crowe, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Alessandro Nivola, and Christopher Abbott. The movie arrives in theaters on December 13.
