Former Quicksilver Aaron Taylor-Johnson to star as Kraven The Hunter
Aaron Taylor-Johnson—whose previous superheroic exploits include a two-film stint as Kick-Ass, and the (non-Wandavision) MCU incarnation of Pietro “Quicksilver” Maximoff—is getting back into the capes and costumes game, apparently, as The Wrap reports that Taylor-Johnson is set to star in Sony’s solo Kraven The Hunter movie.
First publicized last year, the Kraven movie is the latest entry in Sony’s little sideline of Marvel-licensed movies based on characters attached to its Spider-Man rights, only one of which, Venom, has ever actually come out. (The Venom sequel, Let There Be Carnage, is set for September, while Jared Leto’s Morbius has been bumped back to January 2022.) The Kraven film is set to be directed by Triple Frontier and A Most Violent Year director J.C. Chandor, and will center on the second-tier, hunting-themed Spidey villain (although not so second-tier as to have been excluded from the greatest Dave Letterman/Spider-Man mash-up clip of all time):
Taylor-Johnson is something of an unconventional choice for the character, a burly son of the Russian aristocracy who periodically hunts Peter Parker as part of his efforts to establish himself as the planet’s apex predator. Although Taylor-Johnson did bulk up a bit for his part in last year’s Tenet, he’s not the first guy we think of when we’re casting large Russian men who wear entire lions on their bodies while trying to shoot that damnable web-head. (Although he might be better equipped for the character’s more dramatic beats, most notably the famed “Kraven’s Last Hunt” storyline in which the character definitively defeats Spider-Man before taking his own life.)
Of course, there’s also the other wrinkle here, i.e., that Taylor-Johnson signing on for the Venom-verse signals a continued split between the Sony movies and the actual MCU, since it would be fairly wild for Wanda Maximoff to catch sight of her dead brother fighting Tom Holland with most of a big cat wrapped around him. (Actually, hold on, we just got an amazing idea for WandaVision season two…)