Kraven the Hunter Trailer Ensnares Sony’s R-Rated Spider-Man Spinoff

The hunt is over for the Kraven the Hunter trailer. Sony Pictures has unleashed the first footage from its R-rated Spider-Man Universe spin-off online, showing Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Bullet Train) as the iconic Marvelvillain Sergei Kravinoff. Directed by J.C. Chandor (Triple Frontier), Kraven is “a Marvel movie grounded heavily in the real world,” Taylor-Johnson said when introducing a sneak peek at CinemaCon in April. “Anyone who’s familiar with comics and the character of Kraven the Hunter knows that he is a fierce hunter — a skilled, highly-trained killer.” Those killer skills are on display in the red band trailer, which you can watch above.

But the hunter becomes the prey when he must wrangle the rampaging Rhino (The Many Saints of Newark‘s Alessandro Nivola), the horn-headed supervillain otherwise known as Aleksei Sytsevich. Taylor-Johnson leads a cast that includes Ariana DeBose (West Side Story) as Calypso, the priestess and Kraven’s love interest who has served as a Spider-Man villain in her own right; Fred Hechinger (The White Lotus) as Kraven’s half-brother, Dmitri Smerdyakov, the masked master of disguise called the Chameleon; and Russell Crowe (Gladiator) as Kraven and Dmitri’s father, Nikolai Kravinoff.

The official logline: “Kraven the Hunter is the visceral story about how and why one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Set before his notorious vendetta with Spider-Man, Aaron Taylor-Johnson stars as the titular character in the R-rated film.”

Kraven the Hunter is the fourth film in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, which exists separate from Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, home to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. Sony has weaved its own web of Spidey spin-offs that include Venom (2018), Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021), and Morbius (2022), with Madame Web and El Muerto on the way. 

“He is a hunter and from that world of hunting and there’s so manyaspects [to him]. What I love about that character is that he hasflaws,” Taylor-Johnson previously told ComicBook.”Kraven is a beautiful character. Sergei Kravinov is a beautifulcharacter because it’s someone who’s really understanding themselves andhas flaws. This is a character that was built ages ago and it’s in anew time and era, but yeah, is he going to be the hunter that we allwant to see? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.”

Sony’s Kraven the Hunter is slated to open in theaters on October 6th.