Are you cravin’ that hunter? If so, we’ve got what you crave with our recap of the Kraven The Hunter panel at New York Comic Con (NYCC 2024). Cast and crew hit the stage at the annual convention to tease the movie, and show off some exclusive footage.
Things kicked off with director J.C. Chandor, who was marking his first New York Comic Con. “I’m a kid from New Jersey,” Chandor said. “This is a pinch me moment.”
More apropos of the film, Chandor noted the first movie he saw in a theater was Superman. “The idea that this character had never been put on screen before, so you were going to be put in charge of crafting all these characters,” said Chandor. “It’s like an old gangster film. It’s a classic journey, with a bit of a Marvel spin.”
Naturally, since it’s a Kraven movie, it’s violent. “It was an interesting conversation that we had with the studio,” Chandor said. “When the studio gave us the opportunity to do this with an R, we were like ‘yes.'” He notes that it let them do some really “intense stuff.”
“When you get into this character, it was a challenge,” Chandor continued. “This guy thinks he’s doing the just moves, and then fate comes and gets him.”
Chandor also added that he thinks the film is “really good,” and teased that “It’s not just Kraven, we’ve really gotten to dive into the Marvel characters in a really cool way. We’ve had a maquette of the Rhino staring at me for three years now… We’ve walked a tonal balance. We’re not breaking the fourth wall. We are all in. We’re playing this story like it’s really happening… But when you step back the movie still knows it’s a fun Marvel film, it’s supposed to be a good Friday night out.”
And then it was time to watch the opening of the movie. Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is taken to a snowy, remote Russian prison. After getting checked in, he tells his new cellmate he’ll be there for three days. But the next day, after a fight (that he wins) in the prison yard by showing off a little super-strength, he gets called into the boss of a prison. The boss is bad guy who sells weapon that kill women and children. So Kraven rips the tooth out of a tiger rug, kills two men, and then stabs the boss’s neck multiple times. Then Kraven escapes from the prison, jumping off towers and up walls, ripping open steel with his bare hands, then running into the snowy wasteland to safety.
Right after the footage — surprise — Taylor-Johnson entered wearing a furry leather jacket. “He’s just a very unique comic book character,” Taylor-Johnson said. “It’s always interesting playing a villain… He’s not a digital effects monster, he’s a man who made a choice to be a hunter… Kraven is an apex predator, the top of the food chain. Kraven’s a hunter; not a poacher… And like every hunter knows sometimes you have to cull the herd. Once you apply that to human beings, it becomes a pretty dark story.”
This was followed by more footage showing Kraven fighting a bunch of dudes, possibly mercenaries. And it is pretty brutal, as he catches a guy’s head in a bear trap, stabs another one in the head (not sure what his deal is with heads), and finally catches a guy in a trap that drags him to a sharp log that cuts him in half from the crotch up (the opposite of a head).
And then things ended with a photo op featuring Taylor-Johnson and Kraven cosplayers. The hunt is over!
Kraven the Hunter hits theaters on December 13, 2024.
Here’s the official synopsis for Kraven the Hunter, per Sony:
Kraven the Hunter is the visceral, action-packed origin story of how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.
Listen to MarvelVision:
Discover more from Comic Book Club
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.