It’s been a busy week over at Sony with their Spider-Man franchise. Earlier it was reported that Olivia Wilde had signed on to direct and co-write a Spider-Man spinoff film which will feature a female hero from the family of characters that the studio holds the right to. And now comes news of another director in talks for another Spider-Man spinoff film.
According to Deadline, Triple Frontier director J. C. Chandor is currently in talks with the studio to helm another Spider-Man spinoff, this one focused on the villain Kraven the Hunter. Art Marcum and Matt Holloway are handling scripting details for the film. The duo previously wrote the first Iron Man film, which launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Morbius, another Spider-Man spinoff due in theaters next spring.
Introduced back in 1964, Kraven the Hunter is Sergei Kravinoff, is a big game hunter who fells he could only claim the title of the world’s greatest if he were to kill Spider-Man. Although he usually appears in the comics as a villain working either on his own or with the supervillain team, the Sinister Six, he has sometimes been presented as an anti-hero who follows his own code of honor.
While most of the film rights to the hundreds of superhero and villain Marvel Comics characters are owned by Marvel Studios and their corporate parent Disney, Sony continues to hang onto a rights package that they acquired in 1999. In addition to the various films that the studio has made featuring Spider-Man, they have begun to more aggressively exploit that other characters in that they control. In 2018, Sony released both the live action Venom, featuring an anti-hero character from the comics and the animated Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. This year was to see the release of Morbius, though coronavirus-related theater closings pushed its debut from July to March 19, 2021. A Venom sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, is slated for release next June. Last September, Sony hired Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless to write a film based around the character of Madame Webb. The studio had also been developing a film based on the characters of Black Cat and Silver Sable, but more recent reports have that being redeveloped as a possible television series.
