Photo: Jay Maidment/Columbia Pictures/Marvel Entertainment/Everett Collection

Portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the sinister Sony superhero game of the same name, Kraven the Hunter can climb the side of a skyscraper barefoot with squirrel-like agility and pantherian speed. He can easily disembowel a squadron of enemy thugs with his bare hands or with the animal horn/tooth of any jungle cat that happens to be nearby. The character’s skills with a blowgun and expertise in dealing with toxic, jungle-grown neurotoxins make him a top predator for gangsters around the world. But in its opening weekend in theaters, Kraven failed to attract what matters most: a moviegoing audience.

Opening in more than 3,200 theaters across North America, Kraven the Hunter grossed just $11 million in its first three days, placing it in third place among movies, behind him Moana 2 (in the third week) and Evil (in his fourth). Not only did this debut fall well short of pre-release “tracking” estimates in the $20-$25 million range, but it’s also the worst arc for any film in Sony’s MCU-adjacent Spider-Man universe – and thus fell short of the sluggish, nepo-heroic film from February Madam Web ($15.3 million), while scoring a disastrous 15 percent on the Tomatometer and an abysmal C on CinemaScore. International, Kraven It fared even worse, coming in fourth place behind the three-hour-plus Telugu-language action drama Pushpa: The Rule – Part 2.

But perhaps most shamefully when it comes at the end of a year in which Joker: Folie à Deux flopped hard and October Venom: The Last Dance Released in theaters as the film with the lowest grossing figures in the six-year period Poison franchise (with $473 million compared to the first). Poison(Winning $856 million worldwide) – Maintaining negative momentum that began with the Spider-Man universe misfiring in 2022, Morbius — Kraven seemed to confirm one of Hollywood’s worst fears. Namely the one outside Deadpool and WolverineAfter last summer’s record-breaking box office of $1.3 billion, audiences just seem to be fed up with superhero movies. Especially not the Sony-produced antihero films that revolve around Spidey villains, who are contractually forbidden from referencing the web-slinger in any way. “There used to be a floor for these secondary superhero openings, but these three Spider-Man The spinoff audience says, ‘If you don’t give us something reasonably entertaining, we’re not going,'” says David A. Gross, who runs the theatrical consulting firm Franchise Entertainment Research. “Morbius, Madam Weband now Kraven were rejected by both critics and moviegoers. The genre just stopped growing.”

Kraventhe long-running sixth SSU film, was greenlit by the studio with a budget of $90 million, which grew to $110 million due to financial uncertainties surrounding last year’s writers and actors strikes. It’s just one of four superhero titles hitting theaters this year, compared to seven titles released per year in the cowl-and-cape genre pre-COVID. While the Taylor Johnson vehicle conspicuously contains no mid- or post-credits sequences that round out future installments of Spider-Verse films, and is unlikely to stay in theaters long enough to break even, Sony has recent reports debunked Kraven effectively wiped out the Spider-Man universe.

Gross places KravenThe failure to break through at the box office poses a bigger problem for superhero origin stories. “The classics will continue to do well,” he says. “But we haven’t had a successful new character or story in years Poison And Aquaman in 2018. Shazam! opened in 2019 for $53 million; It’s like a dream number and it won’t come back.”