Kraven The Hunter Trailer Gives Venom Horse A Run For Its Money With Rhino Reveal

Beware, "Deadpool & Wolverine," another R-rated Marvel movie is coming for your box office crown. With Dr. Michael Morbius and Cassandra Webb failing to become household names, Eddie Brock preparing to retire, and the rumored "Spider-Man 4" starring Tom Holland still out in the wind, it's up to Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Sergei Kravinoff to salvage the future of Sony's Spider-Man Universe. (R.I.P. SPUMC, we hardly knew ye.) The actor's "Kraven the Hunter" film has gone through multiple release date changes, the most recent of which saw it pushed to mid-December — because I dunno about you, but when I think of the winter holidays, I think of the guy from "Kick-Ass" biting off people's noses and spitting them out, as Taylor-Johnson does in the first "Kraven" trailer.

In case the actor's face-chomping antics didn't clue you off, "Kraven" has now been officially rated R for "strong bloody violence, and language," and will continue this year's trend of R-rated comic book films after "Deadpool & Wolverine" and the incoming "Joker: Folie à Deux." (And yet, for some reason, it appears this fall's "Venom: The Last Dance" will not have an R-rated sex scene between Eddie and Venom. How come, Chief Willoughby?) The movie itself hales from "A Most Violent Year" and "Triple Frontier" director J.C. Chandor, with "The Equalizer" writer Richard Wenk sharing screenplay credit with "Uncharted" scribes Art Marcum and Matt Holloway. The WGA has also awarded credits for "Additional Literary Material: (not on-screen)" to Chandor and six other writers entirely, which is, um, certainly a lot.

On a more encouraging note: Deadline has asserted the film's most recent delay allowed Chandor "to sharpen the characters and tighten the plot," and perform some reshoots that were "effective." Check out the new "Kraven" trailer above and see how you think it's shaping up.

We're a long ways from Paul Giamatti sporting a cartoonish accent and wearing rhino-printed boxers in "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," folks. Where Marc Webb's Spidey-sequel saw the Oscar-nominated star of "The Holdovers" wielding a mechanized suit as hot-tempered Russian crook Aleksei Sytsevich, "Kraven the Hunter" has Alessandro Nivola ("The Many Saints of Newark") playing Sytsevich as, by the look of it, a much more coiled mercenary who transforms into an actual human-rhino hybrid, much like his Marvel Comics counterpart. Instead, it's Russell Crowe who seems to do the bulk of scenery-chewing in Chandor's film as Sergei's wicked crime boss father Nikolai, whose shadow looms heavy over Sergei and his half-brother, Fred Hechinger's Dmitri Smerdyakov. (For more about that, check out /Film's handy-dandy Kraven the Hunter 101 explainer.)

Between the Venom horse in "The Last Dance" and Nivola's horned evil-doer, Sony's next two Marvel movies wisely appear to be leaning all the way into the absurdity of their source material. That approach largely worked for the second "Venom" movie, the rom-com-in-disguise that is "Let There Be Carnage," so it's possible "Kraven the Hunter" will benefit from taking a similarly go-for-broke, wild line of attack. (Goodness knows we could do with more Marvel films that fully embrace their inherent absurdity without feeling the need to constantly snark about it.) Either way, those who prefer their comic book adaptations on the stranger side may want to keep an eye out for this one.

"Kraven the Hunter" attacks theaters on December 13, 2024. Its synopsis reads as follows:

"Kraven the Hunter" is the visceral, action-packed origin story of how and why one of Marvel's most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.