Marvel Studios
Kraven could have been the villain in ‘Black Panther’, but Marvel was stopped for this reason
Kraven the Hunter was the first option for the MCU’s ‘Black Panther’ villain, but legal issues forced them to make a change.
Kraven the Hunter has premiered in 2024, a film starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson which also served as a farewell for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. But long ago, the classic Spider-Man villain was considered as an antagonist for the celebrated ‘Black Panther’ (2018), but Ryan Coogler, your director, couldn’t use it for a reason: It was Sony Pictures, and not Marvel Studios, who owned the rights to the character, as well as those of many other secondary characters, including minor heroes and villains related in one way or another to Spider-Man.
The director of ‘Black Panther’ wanted to use Kraven as a villain but couldn’t because Sony had the rights to the character
One of Ryan Coogler’s initial ideas for ‘Black Panther’ (2018), was to use Kraven the Hunter as the main villain of the movie. Nevertheless, the director and screenwriter of this film could not use it why, two decades earlier, Sony Pictures had obtained the rights to Kraven the Hunter and more than 900 other Marvel characters that were related to Spider-Man. “As a Marvel fan and director of one of their films, I wanted to have as many characters as possible. But I realized that there were contract and license issues that prevented me from using some of them.”, Coogler revealed in an interview with Yahoo UK in 2018.
“There was a very intense stage of the comics written by Christopher Priest in which there was a great fight scene between Black Panther and Kraven. I have always loved Kraven the Hunter in almost all its versions, so I thought, ‘Can I use him?’, and they said ‘No, you don’t have Kraven.’. It was one of those moments where I thought ‘Oh wow.’ Although I don’t even know if it would have worked with the movie we wanted to make,” said Coogler.
Sony Pictures reached a historic agreement with Marvel Studios through which they allowed the introduction of iconic characters such as Spider-Man and several of his villains like Buitre or Mysterio in his movies, but they reserved the right to produce their own cinematographic universe outside the UCM. These Sony stories have focused mainly on figures related to Spider-Man such as Venom, Madame Web, Michael Morbius or Sergei Kravinoff aka Kraven the Hunter.
This last character has starred in his own film, released in December 2024, and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson. He is accompanied in supporting roles by actors and actresses such as Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe and Alessandro Nivola. On the other hand, ‘Black Panther 3′ is already underway at Marvel Studios, and notable performers such as Denzel Washington have already confirmed that they will participate in the third movie of this superhero.
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