Let the hunt begin.

Sony has reportedly found the man to play Kraven the Hunter, the Marvel Comics villain best known as a persistent antagonist of Spider-Man. While Kraven has almost never been the subject of his own comics he’s getting his own movie from Sony, who is looking to turn their corner of Marvel into its own Spidey-centric cinematic universe. And in that movie, Kraven will be played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

That‘s the word from Variety, who reports that while Kraven is getting his own movie, Taylor-Johnson’s “deal suggests he could wind up in other films outside the Kraven franchise. Along with Spider-Man, the character has also tussled with Venom, and he’s a founding member of the supervillain group the Sinister Six — a property Sony tried to get into theaters once before on the heels of 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” Kraven could also conceivably make a cameo in the next Spider-Man movie, Spider-Man: No Way Home, which opens in theaters this fall.

Taylor-Johnson is no stranger to comic-book movies. He headlined two Kick-Ass movies as the title character, and then joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Unlike his comic-book counterpart, Taylor-Johnson’s version of the character died, leaving him free to jump ship to Sony or anyone else who might want him. (Quicksilver returned, sort of, in Marvel’s WandaVision series, but he was played there by Evan Peters, who played a different Quicksilver character in Fox’s X-Men movies. Confused yet?)

The Kraven character is an expert sportsman who becomes obsessed with defeating Spider-Man because his powers make him the ultimate trophy. He seems like an odd subject for his own movie — it’s hard to imagine him working without Spidey to bounce off of — but I wouldn’t have thought Venom could work without Spider-Man (at least at first) and that film did so well Sony already has a sequel coming to theaters in September. Sony also has a Morbius movie, starring Jared Leto as Marvel’s antihero vampire, expected in theaters in January of 2022. Kraven the Hunter is scheduled to open in theaters on January 13, 2023.

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