Kraven the Hunter
Film · 2024 · 127 minutes
Sergei Kravinoff's fraught relationship with his ruthless crime-boss father, Nikolai Kravinoff, sets him on a path of vengeance with brutal consequences. As a teenager, Sergei is mauled by a lion while protecting his half-brother Dmitri in Ghana, and is saved by the voodoo priestess Calypso with a mystical serum that grants him enhanced strength, senses, and a supernatural rapport with animals. Adopting the identity of Kraven, he becomes the world's greatest hunter, tracking down and killing violent criminals to prove himself worthy of respect independent of his father's legacy. Years later, Dmitri is kidnapped in London by mercenaries working for Aleksei Sytsevich (Rhino), who is secretly trying to depose Nikolai; Kraven's rescue mission exposes the depth of his father's manipulation and pits him against Sytsevich and the enigmatic assassin known as the Foreigner, while he grows closer to Calypso, now a lawyer. The film serves as Kraven's origin story, told as a standalone entry largely disconnected from the rest of Sony's Spider-Man Universe, and ends a year later revealing that Dmitri has inherited Nikolai's criminal empire and gained shapeshifting powers of his own as the villain Chameleon.