It's the latest installment in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, which has floundered recently.
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Kraven the Hunter’s new trailer gives us a dark, gore-filled revenge story
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Foundered actually works well:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/founder_2
- [intransitive] (of a plan, attempt, etc.) to fail, especially because of a particular problem or difficulty
- [intransitive] founder (on something) (of a ship) to fill with water and sink
Kraven looks like it’s going to be another disappointment.
Still, Venom 3’s trailer is looking interesting — hopefully it is up to at least the first movie’s mark (Carnage was sadly a disappointment, Woody included) — and Beyond the Spider-Verse is a ‘Shut up and take my money’ deal.
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Can I nominate this for poorest use of the Book of Revelations to promote a move?
Yes I know they’re quoting it via Johnny Cash, but this still seems pretty far of from the original.
Yes I know they’re quoting it via Johnny Cash, but this still seems pretty far of from the original.
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Pwny regretting signing away the ability to use live-action Spiderman in their own movies, every day.
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Who is Pwny?
Kevin Feige doesn't regret it. He has said it had to be done "to keep the lights on." Seems to have done its job for Marvel.
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Find me a western superhero that doesn't have daddy issues. I wracked my brain and the only one that immediately jumped to mind was Optimus Prime.
All of the DC A-listers do, as do most of Marvel's except, I think, Captain America.
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Pwny is an ironic name for the sorry distributor Sony, that actually owns the movie rights to Spiderman and all Spiderman universe characters, who have been churning out these garbage spidermanless spiderman-adjacent films, like Kraven, Goddam Web, Venom, and Morbius, because they signing away the ability to use the Spiderman himself in their own movies via a profit-sharing deal with Disney's Marvel's Kevin Feige's MCU movies.
Of course Disney Feige Marvel doesn't regret the deal, their MCU movies with the spoodermans have been huge hits and they hasn't been the ones flailing around failing with shitty spidermanless spiderman-adjacent films for the past decade.
However much money $ony got out of the deal clearly wasnt enough, given that they've been desperately trying for a hit live-action spiderman universe film for so long now (the "Into the Spiderverse" films dont count and werent part of the deal because they are animated and not in the Disney MCU), and how they actually pulled out of the deal in 2019.
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Wonder Woman definitely does. There's the whole Zeus/Made from Clay thing that gets messed with.
Ms Marvel I suppose depends on which one, but yes you're correct there.
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I get darker and grittier as a reaction to ultra wholesome family / kids films, but that only worked when it was fresh. Exploring humanity's darker side only works if you have something profound to say. I just don't get the style of dark and gritty that's nasty for the sake of it, trying to be deep, but with nothing to say.
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The only counterpoint I would make is that you are ignoring a big chunk of millenials like myself who, while far from avid comic books fans, did love the animated Spider-man cartoon as a kid.
Honestly, so long as the movie is at least up to the "nothing egregious, good bit of fun for 90-120 minutes" quality bar, I think I would really enjoy a Kraven film.
Based on the trailer I'm not seeing anything that's getting me hyped up or anything, but I will definitely pop out to the cinema to watch it in a few months (after I have forgotten about it and am reminded when I see an ad or reviews going up).
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Hack-n-Slash
Ars Legatus Legionis
Who counts as A-list?
Aquaman, Green Lantern (any?), Wonder Woman
Most of the X-Men, the FF...
Also depends on what you're calling 'daddy issues'. I disagree that the WW/clay thing is her issue, but if you're stretching it to that, are you including DD's/Nightcrawler's religious bent?
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Lantern does, or at least Jordan: his dad dies in a plane crash and it drives a lot of his behaviour. I think Rayner does as well.
Aquaman is definitely in this league as well, though it's more parental than daddy.
I'm less sure of the X-men, but it looks like a lot of them do, having come into their care by virtue of alienation and bigotry.
Nighcrawler and the FF I'll confess ignorance of.
In seriousness, there's a lot of parental issues in many superheroes' backstories. I went down the rabbit hole with this a while back and really struggled to find superheroes who didn't have challenges in their upbringing. It made me think there's a trope, here, about being hammered early on the anvil of life, or if it's a leftover from older mythological archetypes.
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I would've sworn that was Oscar Isaac at 1:25 but no mention of him here or around the internet (other than fan casting as Kraven himself)
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Ah. Okay. We’re singing the same tune.
Sony didn’t sign the rights away, though. They agreed to rent Spider-Man back to Marvel because they couldn’t afford to keep making movies they didn’t know how to make, but if they didn’t use the franchise, the rights would revert to Marvel.
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Also, the agreement was on Peter Parker-Spidey; Miles and others are available for Sony to do independent of MCU.
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Eh, WW’s backstory was fine… given life from clay and granted the power of the gods. Silly to unnecessarily retcon it.
Um…
Reed: Dad is a time traveller, disappeared (but comes back and causes issues)
Sue & Johnny: Dad went to prison (also had the accident where their mom died)
Ben: Dad was an alcoholic
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F. Scott Fitzgerald of Gatsby fame had said "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy," that supposedly meant heroism leading to sacrifice, but you can also turn it around to read that hero's need a tragic backstory. Given the general/traditional audience of comics being adolescent boys (though it's more an issue of age than gender), that tragedy is generally the death or enmity of a family member. So it's either "screw you, dad!" or "make daddy (or other surrogate father figure) proud." I'm making some generalizations here, but it's also not limited to comics, a lot of mythology and literature has similar notes in either an attempt to make characters sympathetic or that Tolstoy inspired sentiment that unhappiness it what makes things interesting.
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Hack-n-Slash
Ars Legatus Legionis
I took "daddy issues" to mean psychologically impacted where it's a driving force / part of the nature of the character, as opposed to "there's events involving their parents".
e.g. Bruce Wayne's attitude vs Storm's. Both orphans by traumatic event, but only one focuses on it at all, that I've seen.
Or, compare/contrast Reed Richards and Barry Allen. I don't generally follow the FF, but did it seem like tracking down dad was a concern prior to him coming back, despite Reed having access to a time machine since... what... issue 5?
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This movie is going to flop and no, he should not be the next James Bond. Nothing personal but no. Natural charisma is key and this guy simply doesn't have it. And speaking of Bond, casting somebody like Robert Pattinson should be a no brainer. The guy actually has charisma on screen. Simple good looks and being British is not enough.
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It's going to make a Kravillion dollars. Far far more than the Morbillion that Morbius made, because Kraven is gonna Krave all over those fools!
/idiocy
But seriously I don't think ATJ has enough star pull to make this work even if the writing and direction doesn't suck. Which given it's Sony is a large gamble on its own. Just looking at Web and Morbius Leto and Johnson couldn't overcome the absolute mess of each of those movies.
Leto for all his faults as a human being is a solid actor, Johnson while not great can be decent. Nothing about either of these performances could have lifted up those trainwrecks.
So with that track record... I have massive doubts about Sony's handling of this movie. But I'm open to being proven wrong.
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I just saw this because its available on streaming, and it's not terrible. I wonder if people just didn't get the subtle vibe of Dakota Johnson's acting. Granted, I've not seen her in anything else, so it may be she really is just a flat actor emotionally, but I certainly have seen worse Marvel movies then Madame Web (Eternals and Ant-Man: Quantumania come to mind most immediately).
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That's one hell of a broad brush you're painting with, there. It's also very likely that you may have forgotten just how dark (and gritty) even some of the more escapist cinema classics of the past were. Robocop is full of gore, body horror, and a darkly dystopian corporate future (as well as very on the nose social critique of the then-current socio-political landscape). The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Dr Strangelove, Alien, The Thing, Blade Runner, Mad Max did not paint cheery pictures. And that's not even counting the B-movie, blaxploitation, sexploitation films of the 70s and 80s.
I don't think movies and media today are any (grim)darker than in the past 30 or 40 years. There is and always has been movies at all ends of the spectrum. Maybe the zeitgeist moves the needle left or right by degrees at any one point in time, but it's never absolute.
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I haven't seen the Venoms, but I think the criticism of Morbius is way over the top. It's not good. It's perfectly cromulent. I think it's about on par with the first Captain America movie.
Some of the plot points are incredibly stupid, but the general direction it takes isn't. Jared Leto is a douche bag but also still a good actor. And Matt Smith plays an excellent villain, which is really essential for superhero movies.
Now Madame Web is truly garbage and none of the cast seems to put much effort in, except I guess Adam Scott. I think they're both entertaining enough to waste your internet bandwidth on but I wouldn't pay ticket prices for them though. It's a better use of time than something like Secret Invasion though.
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I don’t know why they keep doing “it’s meant to be dark and tortured” when it has been a proven failure in the DC cinematic universe (after Dark Knight anyway) and in Universal’s Monsterverse as well.
Dark and gritty only works when it’s playing off the reverse. If everything is dark and gritty, then light-hearted will look refreshing. And thus you have the Snyder to Gunn transition in a nutshell.
With Sony, it’s not so clear that failure was the result of bad strategy, though. The execution has been so poor—laughably so in the case of both Morbius and Madame Webb—that it’s hard to tell how competently made movies would have performed.
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Part of a grand Marvel tradition that also gave us [Oscar Isaac reading "Somehow, Palpatine has returned." voice] Blackagar Boltagon.
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Kraven vs Spider-Man and Baron Blood vs Captain America were probably my two favorites back in the day. Kraven was kinda cool, but Baron Blood was scary as a little kid.
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They said it so much that I thought they were rebooting 'Hunter', the cop drama from the 80s.
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And then you spoiled it all by failing to end the sentence with a period.
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It worked for Daredevil (Netflix), though, which was inspired by the similarly dark (and also very popular) Oldboy. Same with Punisher.
Doctor Strange 2 was criticised by fans because they fired Derrickson, who had always said that he wanted to take the series darker.
Guillermo del Toro's most beloved films, Pan's Labyrinth and Shape of Water, are both darker in theme than the Hellboy movies.
Dark movies can be good, it's just that sony and Universal have been making bad movies. Getting rid of the dark won't turn a bad movie good. And for the record, I'm not saying I want a dark movie either. Someone referenced the Kraven arc from Squirrel Girl, and I think that is the best Kraven story I've read in comics. I'd have loved to see something light-hearted and goofy like that. But sony would probably find some way to screw that up, too.
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Superhero franchises are a function of America's morbid desire to return to the past golden age of pre 1960's culture, which was in fact a living hell for countless millions of people. It was an era in which white people could still embrace all the hateful flavors of manifest destiny without knowing ourselves to be complete [orifices]. Marvel and all their ilk are a morose exercise in defeatism foisted upon us by the same media which daily tell us that life is futile, humanity is doomed, and a fatal dose of fentanyl available to anyone with fifty bucks. It's one more example of how despair serves as one of the essential pillars of our economy.
Our overweening self loathing is the flip side of our equally absurd national vanity. There's a message in how science fiction, the one time genre of "what if," has become a moribund wallow in "what was."
Our overweening self loathing is the flip side of our equally absurd national vanity. There's a message in how science fiction, the one time genre of "what if," has become a moribund wallow in "what was."
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At least Venom had some humour. Morbius was just waaay too much Jared Leto.
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