Marvel’s new X-Men movie star Christopher Abbott has admitted that he knew Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff Kraven the Hunter wasn’t “going well” while on set.
The Girls and Catch-22 actor had a small role in Sony’s notoriously-bad Kraven movie, and said it was immediately clear that the film had issues. Speaking via the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, Abbott recalled not knowing what he was doing on set, and basic details of his character being unclear.
“I can s**t talk myself,” Abbott began, saying that he was comfortable critiquing his own performance. “I don’t know what I was doing in that thing. I didn’t understand what the superpower was, I didn’t know what was going on.
“I was like ‘I take off my glasses and what happens?’ I feel like no one really had a good answer,” he continued. “I don’t know what I was wearing in that thing. I’ve sort of buried it deep down.”
Kraven the Hunter was one of Sony’s various mediocre Spider-Man Universe spinoffs that the studio pumped out while attempting to establish its own cinematic universe. While the Tom Hardy-starring Venom found success (and gained two sequels of varying quality), Sony also launched the Jared Leto-starring Morbius and Dakota Johnson-starring Madame Web before finally deciding it could not continue.
Various in-development projects were abandoned over the years, including films centered on minor Spider-Man characters such as El Muerto, Jackpot, and Hypno-Hustler. There was also a vague plan to bring these standalone films together via a Sinister Six crossover movie, with groundwork to set this up evident in Morbius’ mid-credits scene (which features the MCU’s Vulture, played by Michael Keaton) and the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: No Way Home (which features a brief Tom Hardy cameo).
“That was a learning curve,” Abbott concluded, reflecting on Kraven the Hunter. “In the moment, I was like… ‘I don’t think this is going well.'”
“Kraven the Hunter takes aim at the audience and instead shoots itself in the foot with ill-conceived action and a poisonously rote script that totally botches its razor-thin examination of toxic masculinity,” we wrote in IGN’s Kraven the Hunter review, awarding the film an awful 3/10.
Thankfully, Abbott is being given a fresh crack at the superhero movie genre with a leading role in Jake Schreier’s upcoming X-Men reboot. Officially part of the MCU and a key focus for Marvel post-Avengers: Secret Wars, this new version of the X-Men will feature Abbott as Charles Xavier/Professor X, alongside Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, Kit Connor as Scott Summers/Cyclops and Adam Driver as Nathaniel Milbury /Mr. Sinister. It’s a fair bet this will be slightly better than Kraven.
Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP via Getty Images.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
