Kraven the Hunter’s flop spells the end of an era

Embed from Getty Images

As predicted, Kraven the Hunter was a massive flop, over the weekend, opening with a mere $11 million as it came in third at the boxoffice behind Moana 2 and Wicked. 

Kraven supplanted Madame Web to rank as the worst start ever for a Sony-produced Marvel comic book movie (the studio has rights to the Spider-Man universe), and one of the worst for any pic based on a Marvel character, not adjusted for inflation.

Reviewers ravaged the film, while audiences slapped it with a C CinemaScore. The pic also missed its target overseas, grossing a mere $15 million from 60 markets for a global debut of $26 million.

How bads were the reviews? The word turgid was used several times, and that is never a good sign. 

Kraven’s last hunt also took down Sony’s hope of a parallel Spider-Man-based cinematic universe, as many stories reported. Variety combed the underbrush for the bodies of Morbius, Madame Web and now, Kraven. 

The looming box office failure almost certainly signifies the end of this endeavor at the studio, which one knowledgeable insider at Sony imputed to an industry-wide “irrational exuberance about superheroes” that has ultimately led to the overall diminishment of the genre’s primacy as the leading force at the box office.

Morbius did lead to the catch phrase “It’s Morbin’ time!” and the Venom trilogy was an unabashed hit, but still, the combined wretchedness of the non-Venom, non Spidey movies had led to a stench no one can ignore. 

But “Venom” — built around a widely popular character with its own distinct imprint on the culture — also presented Sony with the false impression that audiences would flock to see a movie about any Spider-Man character without Spider-Man in the film.

According to one Sony source, the deal with Disney never precluded Sony from using Spider-Man in its movies that didn’t bear his name; the “Spider-Verse” movies’ profusion of Peter Parkers, Gwen Stacys and other various Spider-People certainly bears that out. But there was a feeling within the studio that audiences would not accept Holland’s Spidey suddenly popping up in a live-action film that wasn’t a part of the MCU, especially after “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the Marvel Studios projects “Loki” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” established definitive boundaries to the Marvel multiverse.

Just a quick reminder, Sony owns the rights to Spider-Man, thanks to a bad contract signed back in the pre-MCU days – as long as they make a Spider-Man movie every few years, the rights will never lapse. Disney and MCU head Kevin Feige teamed up with Sony’s Amy Pascal to sign a brilliant deal to bring Tom Holland to the MCU as Spider-Man, and the result has been several highly lucrative Spider-Man movies produced by Marvel with Sony getting a big cut of the profits. 

But Sony also has the rights to all the characters in the Spider-verse, a sprawling library of many hundreds of beings. Spider-Man has a great rogues gallery, and spinning them off into their own movies could work – but Venom appears to have been the symbiotic unicorn of the bunch. 

While ascribing the failure of Sony’s non-Venom movies to the absence of Spider-Man is a popular theory of course….they COULD have just brought in their own Spider-Man. As we know from the Spider-Verse movies, there are billions of them out there! But that probably wouldn’t have satisfied movie goers who have become accustomed to the fairly tight continuity of the MCU. DC has gotten away with Tyler Hoechlin running around as Superman even though the “real on screen Superman is still in the works, but Sony just couldn’t do it. 

Movie scribes were eager to assign Kraven’s failure to the general decline of superhero pictures:

But at the end of it all, it simply isn’t enough to sustain a genre that expanded so rapidly. Kraven the Hunter comes at the mid-point of a general superhero decline, and by this point, we need something new, not something that stinks of franchise-led decision-making that ruined Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Growing cynicism and awareness of this type of thing suggest that studios have gotten too smart to try and blatantly sell people slop. In their defense, Sony had no choice, it felt like if they didn’t play by the big kid’s rules they couldn’t play at all.

For a somewhat alternate take – and yes there IS one – there’s Matthew Belloni in his subscription only newsletter: 

Congrats to Sony’s Tom Rothman, who’s finishing up quite an epic run of six awful Spider-Man villain movies that will end up nicely profitable overall—as cynical and low-effort a cash grab as any franchise extension since the eleven Friday the 13th sequels. Here’s what Rothman got in worldwide box office and Rotten Tomatoes scores:

Venom: $856 million, 30 percent
Venom: Let There Be Carnage, $507 million, 58 percent
Morbius: $168 million, 15 percent
Madame Web: $101 million, 11 percent
Venom: The Last Dance: $472 million, 41 percent
Kraven the Hunter: ??, 17 percent

Seriously, what a run. Let’s (generously) say Kraven does Morbius business, so by my math, the Spidey villains averaged $379 million per movie worldwide on production budgets that all came in somewhere around $100 million. Not a bad financial return, and luckily for Rothman, he’s not paid by critics.

Given these maths, you can see why Sony kept trying to run out different Spider-Man supporting characters. But as we know from the dark days of superhero films, they are easily turned into cheese with bad scripts and silly motivation, despite the efforts of, this time out, Russell Crowe, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger and Alessandro Nivola in addition to Taylor-Johnson. 

Are superhero movies dead? No, they will never die completely, but they need to be better and they need a change of pace. And Sony needs to get more serious about quality if they really are going to try to bring out more Marvel movies.  

But I think the failure of Kraven the Hunter can be explained by something much simpler. They should have included his tit-lasers, as seen in Amazing Spider-Man #47 by Stan Lee and John Romita Sr.

Movie audiences want something unexpected, and that something is tit-lasers.