Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s 2024 Marvel Flop Is Finding An Audience On Netflix

Streaming is loosely fulfilling a role that home video once had — to rescue box office bombs from complete and utter failure. Granted, streaming numbers mean nothing, the platforms don’t necessarily report accurate viewership numbers, and even if they do, they no longer provide the second financial life that can save movies from total ruin like DVD once did. With how quickly movies are hitting streaming after their initial theatrical release these days, a lot of people just wait for a new movie to hit Netflix or another platform to view it rather than bet their money on it being good and watch it in theaters

Case in point, the strange, confounding case of “Kraven the Hunter” being a big success on Netflix after being a horrendous box office flop in theaters. The movie somehow had an even worse opening weekend than “Madame Web,” which tells you everything you need to know about the level of enthusiasm audiences had for yet another Spider-Man movie not featuring Spider-Man. The film utterly failed to make an impression during the same weekend as “Wicked” and “Moana 2.” The fact that it was an R-rated comic book film did absolutely nothing to entice viewers to go to theaters, especially when earlier that year, “Deadpool & Wolverine” already was a bombastic and very gory success.

It also doesn’t help that the movie is just plain bad. In his review for /Film, Witney Seibold argued there is a charm in this film and fun to be had, but nevertheless concluded that audiences “don’t have to take Kraven the Hunter seriously as a perpetual figure across many movies. We can just watch him in a sucky movie and move on with our lives.”

None of that matters, however, for Netflix watchers. History is repeating itself, and just like “Madame Web” and “Morbius” before it, “Kraven the Hunter” is now a hit on Netflix.

“Kraven the Hunter” marks what seems to be the final nail in the coffin of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. The grand experiment of trying to pull of a “Spider-Man” movie franchise that never, ever featured Spider-Man was a very bold (and some would say stupid) idea. Making an universe almost entirely made of villains who are reimagined as antiheroes was no easy task, and for the most part, every movie in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe was poorly received by critics and audiences.

This is a shame, because at the very least, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe did seem to be building up to a proper Sinister Six movie where Spider-Man could face off against several of his most iconic villains on the big screen (without having to also be an Iron Man movie for some reason). Still, the movies weren’t really that good, they rarely if ever connected to one another, and they never teased any sort of confrontation with Spider-Man or even gave its characters a compelling reason to want to fight him.

It’s also a shame that “Kraven the Hunter” is most definitely not going to have any sort of continuation, as this, moreso than the other movies in this universe, was very much an origin story in the vein of the Netflix Marvel shows. Kraven makes it through 99% of the film before he ever puts on his classic outfit, and even then, he is not really a big game hunter. None of that matters to Netflix viewers who seem to be running to their TVs, laptops, and phones to watch this movie — which, admittedly, is at least a little bit better when enjoyed with either adult beverages or adult gummies.