After seeing Kraven the Hunter in theaters in December 2024, I couldn’t stop thinking about one detail of the movie. Kraven’s arrival on Netflix this week — its debut for the streaming audience — brought it back to the forefront of my mind. Kraven was a huge box-office flop, scoring around $60 million worldwide on a $110 million production budget, but it’s the kind of flop that sparks morbid curiosity. This weekend, many, many Netflix subscribers will pop this flick onto their televisions or second screens, and find out that there was a superhero movie in 2024 where a white guy on a trip to Africa got animal powers by drinking a voodoo potion.
My issue here isn’t about accuracy to the source material, to be sure. It is technically true that Kraven got his powers of enhanced strength and speed from a potion he stole from an African “witch doctor.” (It was 1964, in his first appearance, and I suppose Stan Lee and Steve Ditko were having a real “broad stereotypes” kind of month.) But most modern comics politely don’t mention it, because, you know, the use of “voodoo” as shorthand for “jungle magic” is racist. Not to mention a real tonal swerve for a movie trying to be more Eastern Promises than Indiana Jones.
But then again, maybe my complaint is about accuracy, in a roundabout way. Sony’s interconnected cinematic universe of Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movies (Morbius, Madame Web, the Venom movies, and now Kraven) were born of a mandate to bend secondary comics characters into new molds as self-serious heroes or antiheroes in superhero action-thrillers. Kraven the Hunter might be the best example of how that limited brief was prioritized over other good and obvious choices.
If you had to choose one of Spider-Man’s out-and-out villains to hold down his own movie franchise, Kraven is about as adaptable a character as you can get. After all, he’s almost not even originally from Marvel’s comics.
In the grand tradition of great ideas that Stan Lee borrowed and polished up with superhero clothes, Kraven (full name Sergei Kravinoff) is just a Marvel adaptation of General Zaroff from Richard Connell’s seminal 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” the origin of the saying that man is the most dangerous prey for a hunter to subdue. Zaroff is the villain of the piece, an aristocratic Russian big-game hunter who contrives to hunt unwilling human victims on a private preserve for his own enjoyment.
“The Most Dangerous Game” had already inspired several loose or direct adaptations in film, radio, and television by the time Lee and Ditko debuted Kraven in 1964’s Amazing Spider-Man #15. The story of a man with immense resources who uses them to pursue his terrifying desire to hunt people like they were trophy animals had already become a general trope in midcentury adventure fiction, much in the same way the battle royale has made a big splash in modern action movies and TV: It was a useful structure for presenting a variety of resonant metaphors. Kraven himself was just one facet of the larger trope — or a natural continuation of it into the superhero sphere, however you want to look at it.
And Kraven remains one of the most flexible villains in Marvel Comics. Traditionally, Spider-Man is his nemesis, but in actual practice, he’s been pitted against just about everybody. Creators can make him hunt Black Panther or Captain America, or even make him close, personal friends with Squirrel Girl. He’s a superbly efficient hook because he’s really just a light reskin of a broader trope that’s been used in works as tonally disparate as Gilligan’s Island and Criminal Minds. And it’s not like villains can’t anchor a movie franchise — just look at the horror genre. Kraven and the Predator are the same archetype.
But even when handed a potentially universal boogeyman, Sony’s mandate was to cram him into familiar framing: a morally questionable hero of an action-thriller set in a world largely without superheroes. The filmmakers took the guy whose iconic role is hunting innocent human beings for sport until a hero triumphs over him, and made him the Punisher with a lion head motif to his shirt instead of a skull.
I don’t think this is necessarily because the folks behind Kraven, or other Sony Spider-Man movies, don’t see the potential that the source comics revealed in these characters. Both Kraven actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Kraven director J.C. Chandor have said they were indebted to J.M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck’s defining 1987 crossover Kraven’s Last Hunt, and hoped that they might one day get to adapt that classic story.
But that was always going to be a tall order in the structure of Sony’s Spider-Man Films Without Spider-Man (formerly “SPUMC”), considering that Kraven’s Last Hunt is a story about Kraven losing his marbles after years of losses to… Spider-Man. He hunts down, subdues, and buries the wall-crawler alive so he can don Spidey’s costume and act out his crime-fighting duties while maintaining his own brutal hunting methods. At the end, Kraven feels so personally fulfilled by defeating Spider-Man and (in his eyes) successfully doing the hero’s job that he releases Spider-Man and takes his own life. He’s an Alexander with no more worlds to conquer.
Given all that, there is simply no removing Spider-Man, and his lengthy preestablished rivalry with Kraven, from Kraven’s Last Hunt. And Taylor-Johnson and Chandor aren’t the only Sony Spider-Man figureheads who seem to know that the franchise will always be a two-legged stool without the webslinger.
But on the other hand, it’s equally difficult to imagine a story in which Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven — a grim adult man who turned his back on his crime-lord family and dedicated himself to murdering the most difficult-to-find criminals of the world — sees the defeat and replacement of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, a peppy 17-year-old do-gooder, as an act so personally fulfilling that he would consider it his life’s crowning achievement.
Image: J.M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck/Marvel Comics
And that, I think, is at the heart of the voodoo potion choice. If you’re making a Kraven movie where he doesn’t have a rivalry with Spider-Man and he’s not even a villain, maybe you have to keep the voodoo potion. Maybe, once you’ve changed practically everything about the character to aim at an ill-fitting brief instead of a resonant update or revamp, all that’s left of the original property to mark it as an adaptation are the most extraneous, dated, and cumbersome comic book details. Like a voodoo potion, an Amazonian spider cult, a ferociously contrived medical-experiment-to-vampire transformation, or the Venom franchise’s gradual deflation into a series of comics references lashed haphazardly into a single script.
If the priority isn’t to make the best adaptation, but to make a mold-fitting adaptation, it becomes a lot harder to make a good adaptation. With Sony’s admission that it has no current plans to continue its Spider-Man-less Spider-Man Universe, Kraven the Hunter doesn’t just stand as a capstone on that effort, but as the best example of its flaws. The problem was never that there are only a couple of ways to make a great movie out of Kraven the Hunter. The problem is that there are a ton of ways, and Sony still picked this one.
Kraven the Hunter (alongside Madame Web and Venom: The Last Dance) is streaming on Netflix now.
