Kraven the Hunter’s Failure Confirms One of Hollywood’s Worst Fears

As gloweringly portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the Sony superhero romp of the same name, Kraven the Hunter can scamper up the side of a skyscraper barefoot with squirrel-like agility and panther speed; he can disembowel a squadron of enemy goons using only his bare hands or whatever animal horn/ jungle-cat tooth happens to be nearby at the time. The character’s skill with a blowgun and expertise with poisonous, jungle-grown neurotoxins make him an apex predator to mobsters worldwide. But over his opening weekend in theaters, Kraven failed to bag the one quarry that matters most: a theatrical moviegoing audience.

Opening in more than 3,200 theaters across North America, Kraven the Hunter grossed a lowly $11 million over its first three days, landing at No. 3 among wide-release movies, behind Moana 2 (in its third week out) and Wicked (in its fourth). Not only did that debut significantly undershoot prerelease “tracking” estimates in the $20 million to $25 million range, but it arrives as the worst bow for any film in Sony’s MCU-adjacent Spider-Man Universe — managing to underperform February’s draggy, nepo-heroic Madame Web ($15.3 million) while logging a calamitous 15 percent on the Tomatometer and an abysmal C from CinemaScore. Internationally, Kraven fared even worse, landing in fourth place behind the three-plus-hour Telugu-language action-drama Pushpa: The Rule — Part 2.

But perhaps most ignominious, coming at the tail end of a year in which Joker: Folie à Deux flopped hard and October’s Venom: The Last Dance hit multiplexes as the lowest-grossing film in the six-year-old Venom franchise (taking in $473 million versus the first Venom’s $856 million global haul) — maintaining a negative momentum that began with 2022’s Spider-Man Universe misfire, Morbius — Kraven seemed to confirm one of Hollywood’s worst fears. Namely, that outside of Deadpool & Wolverine’s record-setting $1.3 billion haul this past summer, audiences just don’t seem to turn out for superhero movies anymore. Especially not the Sony-produced anti-hero ones plotted around Spidey villains who are contractually forbidden from referencing the web-slinger in any way. “There used to be a floor for these secondary superhero openings, but these three Spider-Man spinoffs’ audiences are saying, ‘If you don’t give us something reasonably entertaining, we’re not going,’” says David A. Gross, who operates the cinema-consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “Morbius, Madame Web, and now Kraven were disliked by both critics and moviegoers. The genre has simply stopped growing.”

Kraven, the long-gestating sixth SSU film, was given the studio green light with a $90 million budget, which grew to $110 million thanks to financial vagaries surrounding last year’s writers and actors strikes. It stands as just one of four superhero titles to reach the inside of theater auditoriums this year — down from seven titles getting released in the cowls-and-capes genre per year prior to COVID. While the Taylor-Johnson vehicle conspicuously contains no mid- or postcredits sequences teeing up future installments of Spider-Verse films and is unlikely to remain in theaters long enough to break even, Sony debunked recent reports that Kraven effectively killed off the Spider-Man Universe.

Gross places Kraven’s failure to draw box-office first blood within a larger problem for superhero origin stories. “The classics will continue to do well,” he says. “But we haven’t had a successful new character and story in years — since Venom and Aquaman in 2018. Shazam! opened to $53 million in 2019; that’s like a dream number, and it’s not coming back.”

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