It was announced not long before the release of the film that Sony was hitting the pause button on the SSU (Sony’s Spider-Man Universe) after the release of Kraven the Hunter, and now that it’s been in theaters for a week, it’s obvious why. Kraven premiered to horrendously low reviews from critics, earning a 14% rating from reviewers on the aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, but a much more gentle 73% score from general audiences. It’s also been a major box office bomb, opening to only $11 million despite boasting a budget of $110 million. Kraven the Hunter was plagued with production issues and in a recent interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub to promote his upcoming movie, The Brutalist, Kraven star Alessandro Nivola spoke about what took Kraven so long to make it to theaters:
“Once the shoot was over, there seemed to be just a million different kinds of obstacles in the way of it coming out, with the strike and all that kind of thing. So, yeah, it took an interminable amount of time, which resulted in it coming out the same week as these other two movies, one of which I shot only a few months ago. The [Pedro] Almodóvar movie, [The Room Next Door], I’d just walked off set seemingly and onto the red carpet at Venice. So, one of them was just quicker than anything l’ve ever been part of, and one was probably the longest role, although The Many Saints of Newark was stalled for two or three years by COVID. So, l’ve gotten so used to movies in these in recent years getting tripped up by world events.”
Sony has certainly had a rough go of things since the launch of the SSU, and while the studio has had success with Tom Hardy’s Venom movies, which have collectively grossed more than $1.8 billion between the three of them, the other three films have been such epic flops as to nearly erase all the goodwill from Venom. Morbius was the first of the Sony Spider-Man spin-off films to flop spectacularly and generate such awful reviews that the movie turned into a meme, and somehow Sony did the same thing a year later with Madame Web, which exited theaters after only grossing $100 million. Interest in the SSU is so low at this point that Kraven isn’t even generating whispers, but in the eyes of critics and box office experts, the film has still been a colossal failure.
Who Stars in ‘Kraven the Hunter’?
Aaron Taylor-Johnson features in the lead role of Sergei Kravinoff in Kraven the Hunter, and he’s flanked by Ariana Debose, who plays Calypso Ezilli in the film. Russell Crowe was also tapped for the role of Nikolai Kravinoff, Sergei’s father, with Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott playing Aleksei Sytsvech and The Foreigner, respectively. Richard Wenk wrote the script for Kraven the Hunter with help from Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, and J.C. Chandor directed the film. Chandor most recently directed Triple Frontier, the 2019 Netflix Original movie starring Pedro Pascal and Oscar Isaac.
Kraven the Hunter is now playing in theaters everywhere. Stay tuned to Collider for more coverage of the film, as well as our full chat with Nivola, and find tickets below for a showtime near you.
