BREAKING:‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ Swings Into the Global Box Office Stratosphere

Marvel Wanted Kraven the Hunter in 3 Different Movies, and Sony Kept Saying No

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‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ has spent the past several weeks rewriting box office history, and the fourth Tom Holland solo outing has already climbed past ‘Avengers: Endgame’ to claim the biggest domestic opening in movie history. That kind of success tends to invite a flood of behind-the-scenes stories once the dust settles, and this film has been no exception, with writers and directors now free to talk about the ideas that never made it to screen.

One name keeps surfacing in those stories more than any other. Kraven the Hunter, the classic Spider-Man villain, has apparently haunted Marvel Studios’ plans for years, popping up as a discarded option across multiple projects long before Sony ever put him in his own solo film.

Screenwriter Chris McKenna confirmed that Kraven was seriously considered as the antagonist for ‘Brand New Day’ itself, with an early version of the script imagining him turning New York into a citywide trap for Spider-Man, closer to ‘Home Alone’ than a typical superhero showdown, complete with booby traps set up across the city. Marvel and Sony ultimately shelved the idea once Sony moved forward with its own standalone ‘Kraven the Hunter’ film, pushing the writers toward Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey instead.

That was not the character’s first brush with rejection. Director Ryan Coogler revealed that he wanted to work Kraven into the original ‘Black Panther’, drawing from Christopher Priest’s celebrated comic run in which the hunter squares off against T’Challa in an early kitchen fight. Coogler recalled the exchange on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, saying he asked Marvel point blank if he could put Kraven in the movie, and the answer came back fast once the request reached Sony, which owns the film rights to Spider-Man characters. Marvel checked with Sony on Coogler’s behalf, and the studio turned the idea down outright.

According to a widely circulated industry recap, that makes three separate MCU projects where Marvel reportedly wanted to use Kraven and could not, spanning ‘Black Panther’, ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ and now ‘Brand New Day’. The character’s absence from ‘No Way Home’ lines up with what is already known about that film’s crowded villain roster, which leaned on returning Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus actors instead of introducing someone new. Sony’s decision to keep Kraven in reserve for its own franchise meant Marvel simply never got the green light, no matter how many times the character came up in the writers room.

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The irony is that Sony’s protectiveness did not pay off the way anyone expected. The standalone ‘Kraven the Hunter’ film underperformed badly at the box office and with audiences when it opened, making the years of blocked crossover attempts sting even more in hindsight for fans who wanted to see the character opposite Spider-Man or the Avengers.

Whether Kraven still has a future in the MCU remains an open question now that ‘Brand New Day’ has moved on to Jean Grey as its central threat. McKenna’s description of the abandoned booby trap concept has already lit up social media, with fans imagining what a Kraven led hunt through New York might have looked like on screen. For now it remains one more entry in the growing list of villains, alongside Chameleon and the Shadow King, that the Spider-Man franchise built up and then set aside before ‘Brand New Day’ finally landed on the story audiences got this summer.

Which Kraven movie idea would you most want to see?

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