After several years and many delays, Sony’s Kraven the Hunter movie is finally coming out in just under a month. (Hopefully, assuming there’s no sudden last-minute shift.) The movie is selling itself by asking two questions: first, do you want to see Aaron Taylor-Johnson playing one of Spider-Man’s best-known villains, albeit in a story without the wallcrawler himself? And second, do you wanna see him enact so much violence on waves of poor goons?
Recently, Sony put out a behind the scenes video wherein Taylor-Johnson and director J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year) talk up their upcoming film. During their soundbytes are clips of Kraven basically becoming a slasher villain: he chases down cars while barefoot, climbs up heavily fortified buildings with ease, and kills a whole bunch of dudes in a number of gnarly ways. You’ve probably seen most of these in prior trailers, but they’re still quite vicious, given how many he pulls off by using whatever’s in grabbing distance. (RIP to the guy speared by rebar.)
Kraven is the first R-rated superhero flick from Sony, whose Venom previous movies sometimes felt defanged as PG-13 fare. To Chandor, this basically had to be R-rated, as embracing the violence made for a “far more honest” film. In addition to being an origin movie, he described it as a “family saga and good old-fashioned gangster story.” Taylor-Johnson echoed that sentiment by pointing out that Kraven’s just using the skills he grew up learning from his father, played by Russell Crowe. Both men stressed how real their movie is compared to other cape films: real locations, real stunts done by Taylor-Johnson, all in service of what the actor called a “raw, gritty, real-world movie.”
We’ll see how real everything comes off when Kraven the Hunter hits theaters on December 13.
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