It’s official: ‘Kraven the Hunter’ is just as bad ‘Morbius’

No one was expecting much from Kraven the Hunter. Sure, it had the ever-reliable Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the title role, but it also had no Spider-Man, and what on earth is the point of a Spider-Man villain film with no Spider-Man?

The “Sony Spider-Man Universe” sans Spider-Man has been asking that question since the beginning and it turns out there is no point; they’ve just been cheap cash-grabs over, and over again. And yep, all those people were right not to expect too much, because Kraven the Hunter offered precisely nothing.

Kraven’s Tomatometer stands at 15% on RottenTomatoes at the time of publishing, exactly the same as Morbius, the ill-advised super-vampire film that became a meme when it flopped spectacularly back in 2022. Nobody wanted a Morbius film, and they wanted one starring Jared Leto even less. Yet one was released anyway, and it was bad. Memes flowed about the movie making “a morbillion dollars” yet the actual gross was $167.5 million. The cherry on top of the embarrassment for Sony was that they took the wrong idea from all the joking memes and released the movie in cinemas a second time, thinking it had fans. It did not and flopped once more.

You’d think after that everyone involved in the SSU would have hidden their faces in shame, but nope, Madame Web came along in 2024. This told the origin story of Madame Web, another character everyone knew couldn’t truly lead a feature-length movie, and it was a disaster even worse than Morbius. It grossed $100.5 million worldwide, barely making back its budget, and reviews were dismal at an 11% RT score.

Yep, Kraven now has the painful distinction of being just as bad as Morbius and only slightly better than Madame Web—but at least we now know that, thankfully, there are to be no more SSU films. We won’t have to suffer through El Muerto in the future. (Yes, that movie starring Bad Bunny as a completely forgotten Spider-Man villain was a genuine possibility at one point.) TheWrap revealed on December 10 that Sony was focusing on new live-action Spider-Man films instead and leaving the origin stories behind. One insider told them, “The movies just aren’t good.” That sums it all up, really.

It’s a shame for Aaron Taylor-Johnson, though. He really seemed to want the movie to highlight Kraven, a fairly complex character in the comics. “I find that Marvel has this incredible stamp of approval around these iconic comic book characters and this one’s a very iconic villainous character, and I use that as such a high standard,” Taylor-Johnson told Entertainment Weekly recently. “There’s an incredible community and a fanbase for that, so I respect that, and I’m responsible for that character, and I carry the weight of that.”

Reviews indicate that the problems with the movie aren’t Taylor-Johnson’s fault, though. “Kraven the Hunter is fun when Johnson is in action causing bloody chaos but everything else is a drag. Great cast held back by clunky dull dialogue,” read the review of YouTuber Cris Parker. Other reviews likewise single out the dialogue, the plot, and the CGI as the things that drag Kraven down.

Taylor-Johnson deserved much better. Between this and his Quicksilver getting killed off in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the poor man doesn’t have a lot of luck with superhero movies. Maybe he can try again in a few years when the Kraven disaster is consigned to the dustbin of movie history.