Kraven can't fight Spider-Man in his movie, so Christopher Abbott will play "The Foreigner" instead

The Catch-22 star joins a Kraven The Hunter cast that includes Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, and Russell Crowe.

Kraven can't fight Spider-Man in his movie, so Christopher Abbott will play
“Of course! The Foreigner! My favorite Spider-Man… affiliate?” Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto

Of all the strange tributaries jutting off the superhero-cinema industrial complex, few are more bemusing to us than Sony’s “Spider-Man, but we can’t put Spider-Man in them” series of films. Currently numbering at 2 whole movies—with Morbius, lurking like, well, a bloodsucking Jared Leto, in the background—the franchise operates on the (sometimes successful!) premise that characters like Venom and Venom are compelling enough that people will watch their movies even without Tom Holland quipping his way through life.

Indeed, Tom Hardy’s turn as everyone’s favorite interplanetary slime monster/boyfriend has been so successful as to spur Sony in pursuit of films centered on even more obscure Spidey villains—most notably the Kraven The Hunter film that former Kick-Ass star Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been attached to for a few months now.

Of course, there’s an obvious problem with building a franchise of films around characters whose whole thing is fighting a guy who won’t be in them, which is that you have to come up with somebody, and Riz Ahmed can only play so many supervillain scientists. Hence news today that Christopher Abbott (probably, paradoxically, best known from his starring role in George Clooney’s instantly forgotten Catch-22 mini-series from 2019) will co-star in Kraven as, wait for it, “The Foreigner.”

Hey, quick: Look over there for a second while we definitely don’t spend 10 minutes clicking around on the Marvel Comics wiki, ’kay?

Anyway, as we all know, The Foreigner first popped up in Spider-Man comics back in 1986, as a mercenary whose most notable trait was being briefly married to far more famous Spidey antagonist Silver Sable. (He also likes to do elaborate bets on stuff like whether he can beat Peter Parker in a fight.) His talents include being a master of disguise and being very good at shooting people, all of which carry the bonus of being pretty easy on a movie’s CGI budget.

As reported by Deadline, Kraven is being directed by Triple Frontier’s J.C. Chandor. Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola, and Fred Hechinger are all set to co-star.

 
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