Kraven the Hunter Is a Fittingly Terrible Send-Off to the Worst Superhero Movie Franchise
SUMC, RIP
It's time to say goodbye to the SUMC superhero movie franchise. Just days before the release of Kraven the Hunter, Sony Pictures announced that the film would mark the end of the SUMC comic book spin-off series, which has chronicled the adventures of various villains and secondary characters from the Spider-Man comi—wait. WAIT A MINUTE. I'm sorry. What?! You've never heard of the SUMC franchise? You weren't even remotely aware that there even was such a thing as the Sony Universe of Marvel Characters? Well. SUMCs to be you.
The best way to understand the SUMC is that it was an experiment, almost certainly a sadistic one, with moviegoers as the guinea pigs. The experiment was designed to test just how deep the demand for superhero movies went. And the way that Sony tested that demand was to produce six astoundingly rotten movies, movies so consistently and profoundly terrible that it's almost impressive—like the filmmakers had to have some sort of reverse genius, or a stroke of incredible bad luck—for them to come out this crappy. Not only were most of these movies truly god-awful, half of them were built around characters that absolutely no one has ever cared about, and without any of the comic book context or character connections that might have made them interesting on the page.
Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were all based on recurring side characters from the Spider-Man comics, and they were tossed into the franchise salad bowl because of decades-old I.P. rights issues. Spider-Man, you see, is a Marvel Comics superhero. But even though Marvel, which today is owned by Disney, has spent the better part of two decades making in-house movies based on its superhero characters via the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the rights to Spider-Man and a range of associated characters have long been held by Sony.
Complicating things even further, Spider-Man has appeared in a number of MCU-linked films—but only through an I.P. sharing deal between Marvel Studios and Sony. And Sony, looking at the incredibly success of the MCU, decided to try its luck building out a (mostly, kinda) separate movie universe featuring the other characters it controlled thanks to the Spider-Man licensing deal—hence movies based on Spidey villains like Venom, Morbius, and, yes, Kraven.
The problem, just from a storytelling perspective, is that in the comic books, all of these characters are defined by their relationship to Spider-Man. Venom is a comically dark inversion of the hero, almost literally Spider-Man in negative. Morbius is a tortured refraction of Spider-Man's nerdy science side. And Kraven is an animalistic super-hunter with a murder-friendly moral code that is almost directly opposite of Spider-Man's. Each of these characters shone a spotlight on specific aspect of Spider-Man's psyche, challenging his worldview. They were foils designed to push the webslinger's limits.
Sony's big idea was to make a whole bunch of movies about these characters—but without Spider-Man at all.
On the one hand, you can see why: In 2018, Venom made a lot of money. In 2019, Joker, a solo film based on DC Comics' Batman villain, made even more money. Maybe audiences would go see literally any comic book adjacent movie. Maybe all studios needed to say was: It's Morbin' time, and then a billion dollars would appear on their balance sheets.
On the other hand, this was obviously an incredibly dumb idea. And somehow, the execution made it even worse. Of the six films that make up the SUMC, only the second and third Venom films are remotely tolerable, and then only as knowing goofball camp, not as actually good movies. Morbius is an ugly, turgid misfire, memorable mostly for the fake catchphrase online memesters made up for the title character. Madame Web, a Spider-Man spin-off that not only doesn't feature Spider-Man but also barely features any superheroes at all, might actually be the single worst movie I have seen in a theater, ever.
Kraven the Hunter is, on balance, slightly better than the latter two films, but only in the way that life-threatening pneumonia is, on balance, preferable to stage five cancer. The credit for it being slightly better goes mostly to two people: Russell Crowe, who growls and grunts his way through the movie as the title character's Russian mob boss father, and director J.C. Chandor, the filmmaker behind the solidly entertaining Triple Frontier and the subtle and excellent financial drama Margin Call.
Kraven the Hunter is neither subtle nor excellent. But every now and then you can almost sense that it's trying to be a real movie—a movie about something, a movie with, you know, an idea. But like its Spider-Man spin-off predecessors, it's overwhelmed by cringeworthy scripting, cruddy acting, choppy editing, and garish digital effects.
If even a consistently solid filmmaker like Chandor can't make a halfway decent movie out of this silly superhero spin-off concept, then it's probably time to retire the idea. Sony's experiment failed.
Too bad this $110 million mess was clearly intended to spawn sequels of its own, with a new villain fully revealing himself in the film's final minutes. The franchise never took off, and the half a billion or so in production costs are, to paraphrase my friend Sonny Bunch, SUMC costs. Goodbye, and good riddance, to the worst superhero franchise of the last thirty years.
