Kraven film's failure hopefully signals villain-starring fare is waning
Sony's Kraven the Hunter movie flopped even worse than Madame Web, as NY's Vulture reports:
John Nolte at Breitbart addressed the subject:
But, as Nolte's said, comics movies sadly don't look to be running out of steam anytime soon. One more reason why the comics proper are bound to suffer in their overrated wake.
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.The problem isn't comics movies themselves, but fare spotlighting villains as though villainy is truly a great example, in addition to the recent lurch towards wokeness. Why is it some people think villains make far better a focus than heroes and what they do in and out of costume? Do the filmmakers really think just because the villains themselves wear all these funny costumes and sport all sorts of bizarre superpowers, both hand-held and internal, that the audience is going to gush all over them while leaving the superheroes on the sidelines? What a head-shaker.
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.”
John Nolte at Breitbart addressed the subject:
After three bombs out of four, Sony has announced the death of its Spider-Man Villain Universe franchise.I suppose origin stories can get pretty tiresome as a concept after a while, but even so, the glamorization of villainy is what really sinks these films.
Because Disney owns the rights to pretty much every other Marvel character, Sony has one: Spider-Man, and that includes the characters in that narrow universe. Looking to suck the marrow out of that narrow universe after seeing all the money Marvel Studios was raking in, Sony decided to turn to the Spider-Man villains for cinematic product. [...]
Sony now intends to stop with the villains and stick to its main character, Spider-Man, through movies starring Tom Holland, animated features, and something called Spider-Man Noir starring Nicolas Cage.
Granted, I only bothered to watch one of these villain movies, Morbius, and it stunk. Still, I don’t blame the concept or the acting. The problem was a dull story and script. Why must it always be an origin story? Why can’t we jump into the middle of the action and then use a few lines of dialogue to explain how Kraven and Madame Web and Morbius became Kraven and Madame Web and Morbius? Instead, we’re always bogged down in these boilerplate stories about how so-and-so became so-and-so.
So the Spider-Man Villain Universe now joins the DC Extended Universe on the scrap heap. It is now just the DC Universe with James Gunn in charge. Marvel is also rebooting somewhat by bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans as different characters. Marvel went woke, which killed the golden goose, so it’s back to the straight white guys.Well let's hope any DC-based villain universe is also kaput. To make such a spectacle out of the Joker is easily worse than doing it with Kraven, if only because stories starring the Clown Prince of Crime had such an emphasis on committing murder sprees in the past, which Kraven may have had on his comics story record too, but with the Joker, it's more noticeable. All that aside, what's so special about a crook who was written committing suicide in 1987's notable Spidey story, "Kraven's Last Hunt"? I think it was only close to a quarter century later that Kraven was pointlessly resurrected for the sake of having a commercial costumed villain around to cast in stories by writers who were either overrated, or just lost direction. And then Marvel even laughably went out of their way to write up sons and daughters for Kraven who could also take up his mantle. I'm sorry, but that too was a form of sucking the whole franchise dry. We don't need that kind of cynical exploitation any more than the now catastrophous movie.
But, as Nolte's said, comics movies sadly don't look to be running out of steam anytime soon. One more reason why the comics proper are bound to suffer in their overrated wake.
Labels: animation, golden calf of villainy, marvel comics, msm propaganda, Spider-Man
