Sony Produces Its First R-Rated Marvel Co-Production With Violent and Surprisingly Sexy ‘Kraven the Hunter’
Kraven the Hunter is hungry for revenge…and noses.
Sony Pictures will finally release its first R-rated Marvel-adjacent movie, if somewhat later than planned. Kraven the Hunter, directed by J.C. Chandor and originally slated for January 2023, will hit theaters on October 6th of this year.
Here is the first redband trailer for Kraven‘s origin story. The film, which adds Kraven, along with Morbius and Venom to Sony’s anti-hero movie collection, stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Sergei Kravinoff, who becomes one of Marvel’s most iconic villains and Spider-Man’s greatest foes.
In the comics, Kraven shared the pages with Venom, Black Panther and many others during his time as a Spider-Man villain, a big game hunter who wants to bag the biggest prey in the world: Spider-Man. The 18+ trailer Sony dropped Monday showed a no-holds-barred character who isn’t above biting off someone’s nose in a fight.
Johnson, who is, to put it mildly, absolutely jacked for this movie, plays a protagonist who is reimagined as a more politically correct conservationist who has bonded with animals, though he still uses his might against human enemies. The trailer shows him using a huge knife to slice through opponents and, in one particularly wild sequence, even uses a bear trap to catch human prey.
The trailer also gives us some insight into the antihero’s origin story, specifically how he was raised then abandoned by his sadistic father. There are also glimpses of a few other classic characters, including Calypso and fellow Spidey villain Rhino, which is in keeping with the rumors that Sony is planning a Sinister Six movie down the road.
Kraven features a stacked cast in addition to the buff Taylor-Johnson, who is joined by Oscar-winning West Side Story actress Ariana DeBose as Calypso, The Many Saints of Newark’s Alessandro Nivola as Rhino and Eighth Grade’s Fred Hechinger as Chameleon, in addition to Russell Crowe playing the role Kraven’s complicated father.