One Shot From ‘Kraven’ Explains Everything Wrong With the SSU

The following post contains minor SPOILERS for Kraven the Hunter.

18 months ago, Sony introduced their Kraven the Hunter movie with a three minute red-band trailer filled with Aaron Taylor-Johnson running, punching, leaping, stabbing, slashing, biting, and flexing his impressively shredded washboard abs. (Not necessarily in that order.) The coming attraction built to an epic hero shot of Taylor-Johnson as Kraven dressed in the character’s signature fur-rimmed vest as he lights the tip of a spear on fire while standing in a shadowy jungle cave.

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About a year later, Marvel posted their own trailer for Kraven. It contained a mix of scenes from the first teaser, plus new footage — including shots of Taylor-Johnson in Kraven’s famous furry vest as he hunted someone or something with a bow and arrow in that same shadowy jungle. This clip gives even more central placement to Taylor-Johnson igniting the flaming spear. In this second trailer, it is the very last shot before the title card appears.

But this shot — the focus of a big chunk of Kraven’s marketing campaign — doesn’t appear in the film at all.

This isn’t a matter of Kraven using an alternate take or a different angle of this moment. Whatever jungle sequence this shot came from, it was removed from the finished film, along with the stuff involving the bow and arrow. In the final cut of Kraven released to theaters, Taylor-Johnson barely even wears Kraven’s furry vest at all.

Kraven the Hunter is hardly the first movie to hype itself with trailers filled with footage that didn’t wind up in the cut released to theaters. I once made a list of 18 such moments from the various Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ads. A few years ago, a bunch of Ana de Armas superfans sued Universal because their favorite actress was in the trailer for Danny Boyle’s Yesterday but got cut from the theatrical release. (The lawsuit was eventually dismissed.)

Kraven is not even the first Sony Spider-Man spinoff to pull this. Social media had a field day making fun of the teaser for Madame Web, particularly Dakota Johnson explaining that the movie’s villain, Ezekiel Sims, “was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”

If anyone bought a ticket to Madame Web specifically to see that absurd conversation play out on the big screen, they were out of luck. Between the trailer and the movie’s theatrical release, Sony snipped the line out of the film.

Trailers that don’t quite sync up to the final product have been a running theme in Sony’s Spider-Man franchise for more than a decade. The trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man with Andrew Garfield featured Rhys Ifans’ Lizard saying, “If you want the truth about your parents, Peter, come and get it.” (In voiceover, he also adds “Do you think what happened to you, Peter, was an accident? Do you have any idea what you really are?”) Ultimately, The Amazing Spider-Man only included just a few brief teases of a vague conspiracy involving Peter Parker’s parents. Fans had to wait until The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to get the full story.

Occasionally, studios shoot footage to use in trailers knowing full well it will never make it into a movie’s final cut. The trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, centered on the scene where the various members of the team are examined and discussed by their prison guards. In the actual movie, Dave Bautista’s Drax is absent, because he hadn’t been introduced into the film yet. But he is in the version of this scene in the Guardians trailer, so that he audiences could be introduced to all the major characters at once.

Guardians of the Galaxy was made by Marvel, a company famous for their meticulous long-term planning. Kraven (and Madame Web and The Amazing Spider-Man) was made by Sony, a company that … is not. And so a pattern seems to have emerged: The trailer looks one way, the movie looks another — not because of any overarching master plan, but because of the lack of one. The film is conceived in one direction (Kraven turns into the Kraven of Marvel Comics at some point prior to the film’s final scene) and then gets released in another form (Kraven becomes the most recognizable form of Kraven at the last possible second.)

I don’t know whether that feeling of indecisiveness stems from Sony brass wavering on their larger Spider-Man plans, or from changes demanded by Marvel (who shares cinematic custody of Spider-Man with Sony), or both. Regardless, it explains why so many of their Spider-Man adjacent movies have been disappointing. When you plan a movie with one vision in mind, and then reconfigure it at the last minute into something else, that’s rarely a recipe for creative success.

Case in point: After loading Madame Web, Morbius, Venom: The Last Dance, and Kraven the Hunter with all sorts of teases of bigger villains who will menace their heroes in the future, Sony is reportedly pulling the plug on the entire “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.” (In hindsight, building a massive cinematic universe around a character who does not and cannot actually appear in any of its movies may have been a slight error in judgment.)

If you wanted to see how Knull would get revenge on Eddie Brock, or whether Morbius and Vulture would start the Sinister Six, you’re out of luck. (Remember when Michael Keaton’s Vulture was magically transported from the MCU to the Sony universe? Now he’s trapped there forever!) Even if you get yourself a spear with a flaming tip to guide you, you will never find the payoffs to the setups in these Sony Spider-Man films.