“Kraven the Hunter” Trailer Reveals Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Wild Spider-Man Villain on a Rampage
“My son, never show mercy,” says Russell Crowe’s character at the top of the first trailer for director J.C Chandor’s Kraven the Hunter. He’s perched with his boy over the body of a dead gazelle while they’re on safari. “They are prey,” he continues, smearing some of the gazelle’s blood on his son’s forehead. “We are predators.”
The son he’s speaking to will take this lesson to heart. Crowe’s growling father figure proves to be the key figure in the life of young Sergei Kravinoff, played as an adult by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, the eventual Spider-Man villain known as Kraven the Hunter. With their mother sent away because of her “weakness of the mind” and then, apparently, dead before her sons could even say goodbye, young Sergei is made to learn several difficult lessons early on. One of those is that his father is in the kind of business where being a predator is the only means to survival. He’s a brutal crime lord who lives in a world in which the weak are meat the strong do eat. We find Sergei as a young man face-to-face with a lion that he fails to shoot and kill. Ravaged by the king of the beasts and left for dead by his father, the lion’s blood mixes with his own, and a new kind of man is born.
The trailer provides a glimpse into the R-rated film’s approach to telling Kraven’s origin story, making him a similar kind of antihero to Sony’s stable of misunderstood, monstrously powerful Spider-Man villains—Jared Leto’s Morbius, who boasts the superpowered versions of a vampire bat’s strength, and Tom Hardy’s Venom, the product of the marriage between an alien symbiote and a man. Kraven, now connected deeply to animals after his violent communion with the lion, is able to communicate with them as he tracks his own prey, including any poachers foolish enough to hunt for animals anywhere near the man. “My father puts evil into the world,” Kraven says to Ariana DeBose’s Calypso after she asks why he hunts. “I take it out.”
The trailer ends with a glimpse at the man who will likely be Kraven’s most formidable challenge, Alessandro Nivola’s Aleksei Sytsevich, aka The Rhino, another classic Spider-Man villain. He might finally be a half-man, half-beast hybrid who’s at least able to put up a fight.
Joining Crowe, Taylor-Johnson, DeBose, and Nivola are Fred Hechinger, Christopher Abbott, Levi Miller, Gre
Check out the red band trailer below. Kraven the Hunter hits theaters in October:
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Featured image: Aaron Taylor-Johnson is “Kraven the Hunter.” Courtesy Sony Pictures.
