‘Kraven the Hunter’ Trailer Breakdown: Another Spider-Man Villain Joins Sony’s Marvel Universe

Since it started with ‘Venom’ in 2018, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (without Spider-Man in it) has spawned three movies and grossed over $1.5 billion worldwide. Although none of those movies achieved some solid critical results, both ‘Venom’ movies had pretty solid commercial results, unlike the latest entry, ‘Morbius,’ which was both a critical and commercial failure.

Sony is still struggling with their live-action franchise, excluding ‘Spider-Man’ movies that were co-produced with Marvel Studios. Since Tom Holland’s Spider-Man joined the MCU, Sony has been trying to build up their own cinematic universe, featuring only the villains associated with Spider-Man, but represented as anti-heroes. After Venom and Morbius, the third such character that’ll get his own movie is Kraven the Hunter.

Today, Sony released the first official Red Band trailer for the upcoming movie. You can watch the trailer below and keep reading to read our trailer breakdown.

‘Kraven the Hunter’ Trailer Breakdown

The movie will depict Kraven’s origin story!

Just like in Venom and Morbius’ cases, Kraven’s first movie will depict his origin story. Pretty formulaic for a movie of this kind. Before he was Kraven, the title character was Sergei Dimitri Symostivych Kravinoff. The first part of the trailer introduces us to his origin story and how did he become what he is today.

The trailer shows us the known star Russell Crowe in the role of Nikolai Kravinoff, Sergei’s father. One day when they were hunting, Sergei found himself face-to-face with a lion. Although Nikolai told him to shoot the beast, Sergei didn’t, and the lion attacked him and bit his shoulder. The bite was so deep that the teeth marks remained on Sergei’s chest.

Although he survived, Sergei was called “weak, like his mother” by Nikolai, who left his son in the wild. On that day, according to Sergei’s words, “he stared death in the face, but for the first time, he saw his true self.” And that’s how Kraven the Hunter was born.

The movie is rated R, and the trailer doesn’t try to hide it!

If you didn’t know, ‘Kraven the Hunter’ will be Sony’s first R-rated superhero movie. Although Kraven’s story seems formulaic and generic (at least according to the trailer, we might be wrong), this movie has that one advantage previous movies in this franchise didn’t. We won’t lie to you; how Kraven moves like a wild beast reminded us of Jared Leto’s agile movement from ‘Morbius,’ and we know how that turned out.

Kraven is depicted as a revenge-thirst human-beast hybrid that uses his connection with animals to track his prey. The trailer shows us how he stalks his enemies with the help of wolves in the middle of a snowstorm and other bad guys with the help of a falcon (not that Falcon!). We see how he’s attacking his enemies like a true beast, and the movie uses all the advantages of an R-rating. We even see Kraven biting off one of the bad guy’s noses.

The rest of the trailer shows how Kraven has a list of people his planning to eliminate, and from the looks of things, one of the antagonists in this movie may also be his own father. We also meet Ariana DeBose’s Calypso, a voodoo priestess, and Kraven’s love interest, who calls him a lunatic, to which he replies: “You just figure out that now?” The trailer also provided a quick glimpse at Fred Hechinger, who portrays Kraven’s half-brother Dmitri Smerdyakov, also known as Chameleon.

The trailer’s final scene features one popular face!

We saved this for a separate paragraph on purpose. You know how many trailers tend to show some surprise scene after they depict the movie’s title? Well, this trailer is no different. The trailer’s last scene depicts Alessandro Nivola, who was cast for the movie in an undisclosed villain role, and now we know which villain he’ll play.

From the trailer, we see that Nivola will play Rhino; from the looks of things, it seems that he and Kraven might be some sort of allies. Unlike previous movies in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, which depicted their titular characters as anti-heroes, this movie shifts more into that area where the titular character is actually a villain. And if we’re going to get some team-up with Kraven and Rhino, shut up and take our money!

‘Kraven the Hunter’ is directed by J. C. Chandor from the screenplay written by Art Marcum, Matt Holloway, and Richard Wenk. The movie is set to be released on October 6, 2023. Only two weeks after that, we’ll meet Kraven the Hunter again in the upcoming video game ‘Spider-Man 2,’ which was developed by Insomniac Games exclusively for PS5.

What do you think about the new ‘Kraven the Hunter’ trailer? Let us know in the comments below!

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