10 Recent Critical Duds We All Saw Coming
5. Kraven The Hunter
As mentioned earlier, it's been hard to get excited about any recent MCU film, but to give Marvel Studios the credit that it's due, those movies can still be good. For example, last summer's Deadpool & Wolverine absolutely rocked. The Sony Spider-Man Universe, on the other hand? These movies rarely inspire any hope.
This bizarre collection of films that feature Spider-Man villains (awkwardly turned into heroes on most occasions) but not Spider-Man himself have been a mess from the off. None of the Venom Trilogy were that great, while 2022's Morbius and a certain other film (more on that soon) are two of the most critically panned pictures of the decade thus far.
It would've been nice to be wrong about Kraven the Hunter, the franchise's latest film. J.C. Chandor is a good filmmaker, Aaron Taylor-Johnson was well-cast as Kraven, and unlike any of the other movies in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, it finally got the R-rating it deserved. Having said that, any high hopes were wishful thinking; the bland marketing and this franchise's appalling track record made it hard to imagine that this would be any good. And lo and behold, Kraven the Hunter wasn't - it was a completely empty, emotionless watch.
Fine, it was better than its two predecessors, but then again, the bar was as low as it gets. Following Kraven's box office failure, it is going to be the last non-Venom film in this franchise, so let's just be grateful for small mercies.