Last week, Sony dropped a blood-soaked red-banned trailer for their upcoming Kraven the Hunter film, part of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe sans Spider-Man. Films in that shared cinematic universe include Venom and Morbius to date, with Kraven due this fall. But I think the trailer highlighted a big problem with the movie and it hasn’t even come out yet.

The Sony Spider-Man Universe films (SSU for short) struggle by not having a Spider-Man of their own to play with, as Tom Holland is currently on a shared contract with Marvel Studios and the MCU. So they’ve had to make do without the webhead and results have varied, to say the least. Venom was fine, but I wouldn’t call it a homerun and Morbius is still the laughingstock of the internet and King of the Memes. Not many people really knew Morbius anyway and Venom has always strayed between anti-hero and villain in the comics. But Kraven is a villain and one of the all-time Spider-Man villains. And it looks like they dropped the ball with him.

The lesser sin that I can get over but still must be acknowledged is how Kraven gets his powers. In the comics, Kraven, real name Sergei, is the son of a refugee from the Russian Revolution and bestowed longer life, strength and speed thanks to mystical potions. In the movie, it seems that Kraven gets his powers after being attacked by a lion and some of said lion’s blood fell into his own wounds. Kraven then seemingly can warg into other animals, Bran Stark-style, and inherited some animalistic powers, such as pouncing, crawling and biting people’s noses off.

Kraven then sets out to become a master hunter, with Spider-Man being his ultimate hunt. He becomes obsessed with the web-slinger after years of hunting every possible creature on the planet. Perhaps wisely, this version of Kraven is more of a conservationist, being an animal lover as opposed to a hunter. That I can get behind. But instead of wanting to hunt down Spider-Man, he’s there to rid the world of his father’s criminal empire, thus turning Kraven into something of an anti-hero as opposed to a full-on villain. The trailer does feature the tagline “villains aren’t born, they’re made” but nothing in this trailer gave the impression that Kraven was doing anything villainous. He’s ridding the world of villains, just by extremely violent methods. So he’s an anti-hero.

So this begs the question, why bother? As I mentioned, Kraven is one of the top-tier Spider-Man villains, dating back to the 60s in the comics and his comic Kraven’s Last Hunt is one of the best webslinger arcs. His obsession drives him and even defines him. Can you even do Kraven without that aspect that so clearly defines the character? That’s the question. This cinematic Kraven is just so different than his source material, one has to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better to tell a low-budget R-rated original film, as opposed to another Marvel film in a universe that isn’t exactly beloved.