Kraven the Hunter: Why Can’t Some Supervillains Just Be Villains?

The first trailer for Sony’s Kraven movie has arrived, which means we’re once again wondering why Sony is making a Kraven movie. In the aftermath of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Morbius, the world isn’t exactly crying out for another movie about a Spider-Man villain with no trace of Spidey himself.

The trailer makes it clear the movie is playing a bit fast and loose with Kraven’s origin story, transforming him from a ruthless hunter bent on defeating Spider-Man to a tortured anti-hero dedicated to destroying his father’s empire. It’s enough to make you wonder – why can’t some movie villains just be villains? Why does Kraven of all characters need to be changed into a sympathetic hunk? Let’s take a closer look at why the Kraven movie seems to be headed down the wrong path.

How Kraven the Hunter’s Origin Has Changed

In Marvel’s main comic book universe, Sergei Kravinoff is depicted as the son of a Russian nobleman who fled the Russian Revolution of 1917. After spending years training under elite hunters and warriors (like a villain named Gregor), Sergei becomes one of the greatest hunters in the world. Rebranding himself Kraven the Hunter, Sergei makes use of mystical potions to both enhance his strength and prolong his life. 

In the comics, Kraven’s core motivation is his obsession with hunting and besting Spider-Man. He’s long since grown bored of hunting his way through the animal kingdom. He desires bigger, more dangerous prey, and he sees Spider-Man as the potential crowning achievement in his unnaturally long career. But even after he succeeds in defeating Spider-Man in the classic storyline Kraven’s Last Hunt, Kraven never truly overcomes his obsession with our Friendly Neighborhood Wallcrawler.

The poster for Kraven the Hunter may be ripped straight from the comics, but it’s clear the movie is veering in a very different direction when it comes to Kraven’s origin story. His Russian Revolution backstory has been tossed out, as has the idea of him using potions to extend his life. Instead, Kraven’s powers (such as they are) come from his exposure to a lion’s blood, seemingly elevating his senses to superhuman, animalistic levels.  

This is a modernized take on Kraven that emphasizes the character’s relationship with his brother, Dmitri (Fred Hechinger), and his abusive father (played by Russell Crowe). Crowe’s character hasn’t been named yet, but he appears to be an international crime lord and poacher obsessed with hunting dangerous prey. With no mention of Spider-Man in the trailer, it instead seems that Kraven is motivated by a desire to destroy his father’s empire and protect nature. As actor Aaron Taylor Johnson put it, he’s “an animal lover and a protector of the natural world.”

Kraven isn’t the only character who has been radically overhauled for the new movie. Hechinger’s Dmitri has been given a similarly sympathetic makeover, with no sign that he’ll become the supervillain master of disguise known as the Chameleon. We even see Alessandro Nivola’s Aleksei Sytsevich, who appears to be the right-hand man to Crowe’s character in addition to transforming into the super-strong villain known as the Rhino.  

Separating Kraven From Spider-Man

Like the Venom series and Morbius before it, Kraven has the thankless task of trying to establish a Spider-Man spinoff without being able to utilize Spider-Man himself. Perhaps we’ll see cameos from other villains like Jared Leto’s Morbius and Michael Keaton’s Vulture, but Spidey himself doesn’t appear to be in the cards.

Many of the changes glimpsed in the trailer seem to be geared toward separating Kraven from his main nemesis. His motivations are now completely different. Rather than trying to best Spider-Man, he’s a man raised by a monster and forcibly molded into the ultimate weapon. He’s no longer a villain but an anti-hero with a streak of nobility. He clearly has no compunction against killing, but this Kraven seems to reserve his wrath for his father’s men and others who would abuse the natural world for their own, personal gain.

All of this appears to be part of an effort to transform Kraven into a character audiences can root for. Which is understandable, but at what point is the movie’s vision of Kraven too divorced from the source material? When does Kraven the Hunter become guilty of trying to shove a square supervillain peg into a round superhero movie hole?

At what point is the movie’s vision of Kraven too divorced from the source material?

Kraven is not a character who can be easily separated from Spider-Man. He started his life as a Spider-Man villain, and despite occasional tussles with other characters like Black Panther and Venom, he’s a Spidey villain at his core. His all-consuming desire to prove himself as Spider-Man’s superior is at the center of who he is. 

Kraven was never really meant to be the sympathetic anti-hero the movie portrays him as. He’s not a man overcoming a tortured childhood and rebelling against his tyrannical father. He’s a hunter utterly devoted to his craft. We understand why Kraven does what he does. We can even appreciate that he follows a certain personal code of honor. But ultimately, Kraven is and always has been a villain. 

Again, these changes appear to be motivated by the needs of Sony’s shared universe (currently dubbed “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe”) and the studio’s inability to actually include Spider-Man in these films. Without his life’s obsession to motivate him, Kraven has to become something else in order to support his own movie. The result is a protagonist who resembles the source material only in superficial ways. Marvel fans can hope for the best, but 2022’s Morbius doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence in Sony’s approach to these villain-centric Marvel movies.  

Joker and Hollywood’s Supervillain Obsession

Movies like Kraven the Hunter and Morbius are just the latest examples of a longstanding trend in Hollywood where superhero movies downplay the heroes in favor of their villains. As much as these movies are products of Sony’s inability to feature Spider-Man, Sony must also see the allure of an R-rated comic book movie built around a recognizable villain. Every studio wants its own version of 2019’s Joker. 

Though it should be pointed out that the practice of downplaying heroes in favor of their villains dates back much further. The Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman series was always guilty of that practice. Whether he was played by Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer or George Clooney, Batman was always hard-pressed to stand out alongside his campier, scenery-chewing opponents. 1992’s Batman Returns may be the most glaring example. With so much emphasis on building a sympathetic backstory for Danny DeVito’s tortured loner Oswald Cobblepot, Returns plays more like a Penguin movie than it does a Batman movie.

More recently, we’ve seen this practice take hold in the DCEU. 2016’s Suicide Squad put the spotlight on a team of villains, even before characters like Flash and Cyborg had been fully introduced. DC even made the dubious choice to break Black Adam away from the Shazam franchise. Rather than make Dwayne Johnson’s character the main villain of either Shazam movie, he was given his own solo project that treated him as a sympathetic antihero. Not that the idea of Teth-Adam as an anti-hero doesn’t have a basis in the comics, but why ignore that connection to Shazam and their shared history?

Nor is Warner Bros. the only studio guilty of that practice. Fox’s X-Men movies were also villain-obsessed to a fault. The X-Men line was overly preoccupied with characters like Magneto and Mystique, while most of the heroic characters (apart from Hugh Jackman’s bad boy Wolverine) were given the bare minimum of depth and complexity. 2011’s X-Men: First Class may have ostensibly been a team movie, but it was a Magneto origin story first and foremost.

Now Joker seems to have ushered in a whole new era of villain-focused superhero movies. Joker truly cracked the code, giving DC fans a dark psychological horror movie that sheds light on the origin of arguably the most iconic supervillain in comics, all without ever featuring Batman himself (no, a kid Bruce Wayne doesn’t count). The film achieved both critical and commercial success, including netting a Best Actor Oscar for star Joaquin Phoenix. 

But as much as studios may want to replicate the Joker formula, not every character is suited for the “superhero-free supervillain origin story” treatment. Joker had the benefit of being built around one of the most fascinating questions in the DC Universe – what sort of trauma turns an ordinary man into the Clown Prince of Crime? There were huge blanks to fill and plenty of room to define Arthur Fleck in his journey toward becoming Joker. 

Ultimately, the goal was to give us a fully-formed villain, and Joker is so grounded that it barely even qualifies as a comic book movie in the traditional sense. Kraven the Hunter, by comparison, is building toward the introduction of an anti-hero, if not an outright hero. It has all the trappings of a comic book movie, right down to the superhuman powers Kraven gains from the drop of lion’s blood.

Sergei Kravinoff isn’t Arthur Fleck. His past isn’t necessarily that important.

Sergei Kravinoff isn’t Arthur Fleck. His past isn’t necessarily that important. He isn’t the end result of a lifetime of mental and physical abuse. He’s just a man who wants to prove himself as the world’s greatest hunter by besting the world’s greatest hero. Separate Kraven from Spider-Man and you’re not left with much of a character. 

We can only hope that Sony and Marvel reach some sort of arrangement that allows for Spider-Man (either Tom Holland’s Peter Parker or another version) to start playing a more direct role in these villain spinoff films. The Venom series is one thing, as Marvel has spent decades slowly distancing Venom from Spidey in the comics and giving the character his own mythology. But for characters like Morbius and Kraven, Spider-Man’s absence is felt too strongly. Kraven just needs to be a villain, and for that he needs his greatest enemy. 

For more on the future of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, brush up on every Spider-Man spinoff movie in the works and see the 5 Silk comics to read before Silk: Spider Society debuts.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.