Kraven the Hunter suffered the worst-case scenario in a box office crash this weekend, taking just $11 million domestic and headed toward an equally bad international rejection.
Aaron Taylor Johnson stars in “Kraven the Hunter.” (Jay Maidment/Sony Pictures via AP)
Despite the failure of both Kraven the Hunter and The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim (which came in under $5 million for New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Discovery), Disney’s record-breaking Moana 2 and Universal’s Wicked continued their blockbuster performances and helped elevate the weekend box office overall.
Moana 2 is at roughly $27 million stateside through close of business Sunday, while Wicked conjured up another $23 million. That puts the Mouse House’s sequel at $717 million worldwide, and the beloved Broadway musical adaptation at $525 million.
Even the 10-year anniversary re-release Interstellar was a gift that keeps on giving, down less than 30% in North America this weekend with $3.3 million, and making me wonder if distributor Warner is wishing it could swap theater counts between Interstellar and The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
‘Kraven the Hunter’ Slays Sony’s Spider-Man Universe
Any secret hope in the halls of Sony that Kraven might overperform and deliver a last-minute reprieve from cancellation for the SSU were dashed on the hard rocks of box office reality.
Driving — or rather, not driving — attendance was a mix of low expectations, even lower public interest, and terrible word of mouth in the form of bad reviews to the tune of 15% at Rotten Tomatoes (meaning 85% of critical reviews were negative) and audience grades of C+ via Cinemascore, the latter being the kiss of death for a superhero property like this.
Sony already watched Morbius and Madame Web face-plant at the box office — earning a mere $167 million and $100 million globally, respectively. And its trilogy-capping Venom: The Last Dance proved a case of diminishing returns as the lowest-grossing film of the series, finishing with $475 million worldwide compared against the first Venom’s $856 million in 2018 and Venom: Let There Be Carnage’s $506.8 million in 2022.
My own efforts to examine the failure of the SSU and how it might be redeemed in some future form seem inadequate in the face of such an outright rejection this weekend.
However, I still don’t put it past Sony to seek a way for these films pay off much bigger in the long run, to have established an eventual second sandbox in which to play with these characters and a different Spider-Man capable of carrying it forward. I think they’ve got to be close to recognizing how this is inherently an event-focused franchise in its optimal revenue-generating form. It needs to put up big numbers and drive merchandising not only forward but in reverse, too, for these prior films.
‘Kraven The Hunter’ Can’t Slay Spider-Man
Kraven is such a big financial as well as reputational hit, I fear it’s similar to what happened with the DCEU and Batman’s brand becoming eventually injured by the broader damage done to the DCEU brand. That situation resulted in The Flash finishing its box office race with only $275 million in the tank, despite heavy branding around Michael Keaton’s popular Batman returning. Not a disaster for Batman, but a sign he could no longer be taken for granted as an automatic money-maker.
At some point, if audiences perceive enough tie-in and dot-connecting Spider-Man to a slate of flops with bad reputations, there comes a danger that stacked up failures in the SSU could hard Spidey’s own brand eventually.
I don’t believe we’re in that territory, at least not yet. However, I do believe that another failed effort to continue the current approach and trajectory, or to interject more links to Spider-Man but without making the leap of introducing Spider-Man directly into the films and branding them as such, runs the strong risk of turning off viewers and finally doing reputational damage to the web-slinger himself.
Luckily, Sony recognized the situation with the SSU and smartly pulled the plug on continuing the current iteration and approach, to wisely focus on Spider-Man movies. Because after all, we know Spider-Man’s arch enemy has always been his personal life, not the villains he faces who ultimately only bring out the best in him and remind him of who he is and how to have the courage to make the right choice — however hard it may be at the time — and keep moving forward top win the day.
Like his comic book alter ego, then, Kraven the Hunter was always destined to come home empty-handed in the end. Because Spider-Man won’t give up and won’t lose.
