It has been a strange year for superheroes at Sony. After the lackluster appearance of the criminal mockery Madame Web, with no animated Spider-Men to rely on, all eyes turn to the autumn and winter seasons as the studio brings the final end The Venom movie to theaters and introduces a new groundbreaking hero: the longtime elusive villain Spidey, Sergei Kravinoff, also known as Kraven the Hunter. If our expanded first look at the film is anything to go by, it will be a bloody descent later this year.
Although we have already been given a quick glimpse of the violent family drama unfolding in JC Chandor’s upcoming film at its premiere at New York Comic Con last night, the director and star Aaron Taylor-Johnson made his first appearance in the opening scene of the film. The film aims to show audiences what will make the R-rated superhero film stand out. The film features almost entirely translated dialogue in Russian, and it begins in a snowy tundra area as a lone truck travels along a quiet road. As the truck stops at a gas station, it is revealed to be a prisoner transport: a soldier exits the truck and instructs the prisoners to follow for a short break, including Kraven. As the truck heads to a nearby prison colony, we are taken inside where Kraven and the other new prisoners are led to claim their belongings, surrounded by guards and prisoners alike banging on bars and railings to intimidate them. Kraven meets his brutish roommate who tells him in Russian that he doesn’t like sharing a room with someone. Kraven responds to the mutual feeling, but tells his new “friend” not to worry about sharing – Kraven will only be held for a maximum of three days.
Later on, Kraven is seen lifting weights in the training yard when two other prisoners approach him, trying to convince him to stop – he is training in a “special area,” they say, as they each place their body weight on the ground. The tape rolls up on Kraven’s chest. However, he is unfazed, pushing back and lifting the weights again before slamming them to the ground, rising, and striking the fools in the face. “It’s an open area,” Kraven tells them, as we are then taken to where he is taken to meet their apparent leader: the mob boss Kirill. The gangster lives a comfortable life behind bars, in a well-furnished office cell decorated with a tiger skin carpet, which becomes very important after the mob boss asks Kraven who he is. “I’m a hunter, I hunt men like you,” growls Kraven, only for the mob boss to declare the hunter a legend. Kraven offers his name, bows to the carpet, takes one of the tiger’s teeth from the rug to use as a primitive dagger, and stabs his way through Kirill’s men before finally climbing atop the mob boss’s main desk. “There’s always a grain of truth in myths,” Kraven warns him before plunging the tooth into his neck and splattering blood with each strike.
From there, chaos reigns: a guard opens the door startled by the bloodshed, only for Kraven to almost run through it, sending him flying as Kraven storms the prison, swinging over and under the walls to reach the rooftops. Spotted by spotlights, the guards chase him, firing at Kraven to no avail as he climbs and darts around the prison like a wild beast. After scaling the walls, Kraven bolts through the snowy tundra surrounding the prison colony and disappears into the distant snowstorms, putting an end to the sequence.
But that wasn’t all Sony had to show. The studio also gave a brief glimpse of the scene seen for the first time in the Kraven teaser trailer, pushing the character’s animalistic brutality further. Moving forward in the film, the scene shows a group of armed mercenaries preparing to attack Kraven in a dense forest. As one of the clients steps out of the cars, we see Kraven in his own base, inspecting wall after wall of knives and swords, choosing his arsenal. Returning to the forest, the prepared mercenaries are stunned after a large lynx passed by their location, only to reveal that Kraven is already among them, hiding in the bushes and hunting his prey.
Instantly, things turn savage. In a rapid succession, Kraven hunts down the mercenaries one by one in a bloody manner: he traps one with a bear trap over his head, opens another with one of his blades before burying a hatchet in a third’s skull. Two of the most brutal killings are not directly related to Kraven at all: one mercenary triggers a tripped wire sending a spiked log flying towards him, crushing him against a tree, while another gets caught in a series of taut bear traps that pull him along the forest floor at high speed into a spear on a nearby tree trunk, splitting him in half in a spray of blood.
“When the studio gave us the opportunity to decide if we wanted to do this as an R-rated film, we said: Yes!” Chandor told fans before presenting the footage at NYCC. “It was an amazing opportunity, opened up sort of some real intense stuff on one side, and then some really personal intense stuff.”
The footage certainly showed the extent of that Kraven the Hunter savagery hopes to continue to push forward in terms of violence – we’ll have to wait until December 13 to see if it can match this intensity with the character’s story and end Sony’s strange superhero year. Regardless, it’s sure to end 2024 on a bloody note, at the very least.
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