Aaron Taylor-Johnson goes on a bloody rampage in first Kraven The Hunter trailer

Screenshot: YouTube

The idea of making movies about Spider-Man’s most iconic villains without ever having Spidey actually show up still doesn’t make much sense, even counting the success of Venom, but here we are again with another of those movies—the first since the fairly disastrous debut of Morbius. This time around, we’ve got Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Kraven The Hunter, a solo movie about the origin of the bad guy who is best known for wearing a cool lion vest and wanting to kill Spider-Man.

KRAVEN THE HUNTER – Official Red Band Trailer (HD)

There’s no Spider-Man in this first trailer for Kraven, but Sony did sneak in a subtle nod to the ol’ Web-Head—see if you can spot it (it’s the part where there’s a bunch of spiders for some reason). This trailer establishes that young Kraven gets animal powers from lion blood somehow, a change from the comics (where he uses a strength-enhancing potion rather than just having animal powers like Animal Man or Vixen from Marvel’s Distinguished Competition), but he’s not the only one. Maybe that’s just a thing in this universe?

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Also, while we’re asking questions, the trailer seems to be setting up that Kraven murders bad guys, but the tagline is “villains aren’t born, they’re made,” so is he a villain or an antihero who kills villains? We’ll hopefully find out when Kraven comes out in theaters in October (the trailer doesn’t get any more specific than that).

Kraven also stars Russell Crowe as Kraven’s dad, Fred Hechinger as Kraven’s brother (a.k.a. the Chameleon, another Spidey villain), Ariana DeBose as Calypso, and Alessandro Nivola as the Rhino. Christopher Abbot will also be there as some villain, but his role hasn’t been confirmed.

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