Kraven the Hunter Delayed! Is the Movie in Trouble?

Kraven the Hunter Delayed! Is the Movie in Trouble?

Yesterday it was reported that the upcoming SPUMC movie, Kraven the Hunter has been delayed four months from August 2024 to December 2023. This movie has been delayed multiple times and given Sony’s track record, this may not be a good sign! What do I think about it? Let’s get started!

PRODUCTION HISTORY: Kraven the Hunter is one of the classic Spider-Man villains, he debuted in the comics a long time ago. They’ve been trying to integrate Kraven into the movies for a while. Sam Raimi has said that he wanted to include Kraven in his canceled Spider-Man 4. When they rebooted with Andrew Garfield they teased Kraven in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but that was canceled because the movie was not received well. Ryan Coogler even wanted to include Kraven in Black Panther (2018) because of the Black Panther comic book run that featured Kraven. Before the release of Venom, Richard Wenk was hired to write a Kraven the Hunter movie. Wenk said his script was going to take inspiration from “Kraven’s Last Hunt”,  a classic Spider-Man vs Kraven comic book run. Wenk also said his version took inspiration from Kill Bill and he wanted Antoine Fuqua to direct the film. When Sony and Marvel were trying to figure out the plot for Tom Holland’s third Spider-Man movie, they considered including Kraven in the film. In interviews, Holland has said that he liked the ideas thrown around with Kraven. This obviously never happened because they decided to move in the direction of Spider-Man: No Way Home. In August 2020, Art Marcum and Matt Holloway were hired to rewrite Wenk’s Kraven script. Around this time, J.C. Chandor was hired as the director. In May 2021, Aaron Taylor-Johnson was cast as the title character. Filming for the film happensed from February 2022 to June 2022. Around this time, the film was given a January 2023 release date. Then it was delayed in October 2023. With the strikes last year that movie was delayed to August 2024. Then yesterday it was delayed once again to December 2024. There’s a lot of delays surrounding this film and sometimes that’s not a good sign. 

MY THOUGHTS

• My instant reaction when I saw this was “yikes, this is not good”. Now I haven’t always had super high expectations for this movie. I think the idea of the SPUMC universe is a cheap way to print money. But right now, half of the movies have lost a LOT of money. They keep on greenlighting bad scripts with bad ideas. For that reason, I’ve never been super excited for this movie. You can see a pattern here with Morbius which did not turn out very good. The movie was supposed to come out in July 2020, but because of COVID they delayed the film a whole bunch. At one point, the movie was supposed to come out in January 2022 three weeks prior, but they delayed the film to April 2022. The movie finished filming in February 2019, the movie came out over three years late. I know that COVID had a lot to do with it, but even when the movie was finished they were still doing reshoots. Recently, Michael Keaton said that Sony didn’t know what they wanted to do with Vulture’s cameo in that film. Sony has not done a good job of running this SPUMC universe. I’m not surprised that the film got delayed again, because pretty much every single one of these movies has gotten delayed a whole bunch. Madame Web’s original release date was July 2023 and didn’t come out until February 2024. 

• There wasn’t really even a reason attached to the announcement of Kraven the Hunter being delayed. The reason why it was delayed from October 2023 to August 2024 was because of the strikes. They wanted Aaron Taylor-Johnson out promoting the film, but he couldn’t. I get that, you want your star to go out selling the film. But even then, why was it delayed 10 months? I’m pretty sure they finished filming this movie before Madame Web did. So I don’t know if they didn’t have Kraven the Hunter take Madame Web’s release, and push back Madame Web to August 2024. It’s weird, I bet they’re heavily reworking this film. I don’t think reworking the film is a good idea, that’s one of the reasons why Morbius didn’t work so well. Maybe part of it is they’re listening to the fans and trying to get it right. I doubt it, but that’s possible.

• Again, I’ve never been super excited for this movie. I don’t think this movie is going to be very good, it’ll be mediocre at best. But, with it being rated-R and being more street level. I think there's a way in which this could be a movie that stands out in the genre, I don’t think it’ll be because I don’t fully trust Sony. But if they really tried to get this movie right, I think this movie could be very cool. Do I think it’s going be very good? No I do not.