“Fuck yes, it’s going to be rated R,” was how actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson introduced the first trailer for Kraven the Hunter back in April to CinemaCon audiences. Now that the trailer is out in the wild for general consumption, we’ve all seen how fiendishly hot Mr. Taylor-Johnson looks in the role — and it’s safe to say we’ve all got some variation of the f-word rolling around on our own tongues. Most likely the verb form, followed by a “me,” and then possibly a “daddy.”
On her Instagram, filmmaker Sam Taylor-Johnson, referencing her partner’s laser-cut abdominal muscles on the film’s poster, put it more subtly: “Kravin’ my Hunter.”
Aww! That’s totally sweet. But it’s a decidedly PG declaration for a movie in which Aaron Taylor-Johnson wears a sleeveless strappy leather vest while straddling a man and biting his nose off, then spitting it straight into the camera.
Kraven brings sexual heat back to superhero movies.
In his Spider-Man spinoff, this Marvel villain calls for a more primal, guttural callback. Grunts, really. You know that scene in The Northman where all the hot Vikings are half-naked and screaming around a fire? This is like that, but it’s in your pants.
Movie superheroes, for all of their great big muscles on display, typically remain sexless trinkets. Even when Deadpool finds himself getting pegged, it’s with a wink — a goofy, “Ooh ain’t we naughty” meta-textual smirk. There’s a sense of remove, like the sunrise mists that obscure Richard Madden’s side-butt in that single tasteful lovemaking moment in Chloe Zhao’s Eternals. The MCU will let its characters be lightly romantic adults, but only if they’ve been around for millennia, it seems. Even Kraven’s brothers in Spidey-verse villainy, Venom and Morbius, haven’t broken from this modest mold.
Kraven, on the other hand, is coming at us crotch-forward. Just look at that poster again.
Credit: Sony Pictures
Those abs, all 18 of them, were carved straight from marble (with a gloss of photoshop sculpting). Biceps flexed, a fist pumped up to his face where we’re met with a scowl so aggressive it shakes us to our cores, and then further south of that. A mane of lion’s fur and a tooth necklace around his neck adds an air of man-beast flair. A million sexual awakenings are stirring, staring at this image. Superheroes haven’t been this kinky since Michael Keaton and a catsuited Michelle Pfeiffer fought as foreplay in Batman Returns.
And the Kraven the Hunter trailer only leaps and bounds this horned-up aura even further, much like Kraven pouncing up the walls to attack his prey. An average MCU superhero movie usually promises us a single brief shirtless shot — months upon months of gym training only to have a pec or tricep immortalized for a split second. How these actors’ personal trainers must weep when they see the film’s final edit!
Kraven, however, is flashing flesh across half this footage. His bondage top alone is a feast for a thousand fantasies. And the shadowy ab reveal stolen straight from Brad Pitt’s legendary shirtless scene in Fight Club? Forget about it. At one point a voice intones, “There is an animal in each one of us,” and we cry in return, “Can he be the animal inside each one of us? That man right there, please?”
Kraven is a superhero who fucks.
OK, yes, technically he’s an “antihero.” Whether we get an actual sex scene or not (and we’re not so drunk on Aaron’s animal magnetism to think we actually will), there’s more heat in the millisecond we see between Kraven and Calypso (Ariana DeBose) than Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman ever managed to emit across their 17 or however many films together.
When Sanctuary‘s Christopher Abbott (playing a character called “the Foreigner”) says, “He uses a connection with animals to track his prey, and once you’re on his list there’s only one way off,” being murdered is not the first thing that pops to mind. Oh most definitely, get me off (your list), Mr. Hunter!
Not to mention — the man loves animals? He actually speaks with them, converses with them, like a good boy? Picture it: Kraven coming home from a hard day of biting off dude’s noses, hanging his sweaty leather vest on a hook, jumping in the shower and lathering up those outrageous abs all while having a conversation with his adorable wolf-doggy about how their day was? Is there anything hotter?
So yes, Sam Taylor-Johnson, we too find ourselves kravin’ this hunter. But our thoughts don’t stop there. Nowhere close. They keep going, and going, and going. Kraven says he stared death in the face and discovered his true self? We stared Kraven in the abs and discovered our true selves. And they’re as horned up as a rhino. It’s pouncin’ time!
Kraven the Hunter will open in theaters Oct. 6.
