Kraven the Hunter is far from a faithful adaptation of Marvel Comics, though fans don’t seem to be complaining about that. The comic book character ranges from a flamboyant and silly rival to a conniving, maniacal genius, but he’s never quite the antihero he is on the big screen. Here’s a look at how Sony’s Kraven the Hunter changed the character for its adaptation, but fair warning: there are spoilers ahead!

Sergei Kravinoff comes from a wealthy Russian family with an interest in big-game trophy hunting. As a young man, he drank a magical serum that granted him enhanced strength, sense, and vitality, which he related to the animals he hunted. Those two sentences can be attributed to both the comic and movie versions of Kraven – but from there, things begin to diverge drastically. Perhaps the most important change comes in the setting, as the movie modernized Kraven’s origin story.

Kraven was first introduced to Marvel comics in 1964 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. There, he was described as the son of a fallen Russian aristocrat. His family had been wealthy and influential up until 1917, when the Russian nobility was taken down in the February Revolution. Newer versions of the story don’t place it in that period specifically, which sometimes removes the connotations of Red Scare and Cold War conflicts from his character. Over time, the comics also leaned less on this aristocratic background.

The movie version of Kraven is much more modern, though the year isn’t specified. More importantly, his family background has less to do with nobility and more to do with wealth. In the movie, his father is an organized crime boss with an interest in drug smuggling, among other things. Read below to see how this change has ripple effects on the rest of Kraven’s story.

Origin Story

In both the comics and the movie, Kraven inherits the hobby of big game hunting from his family, and that leads to his acquisition of superpowers. However, in the original comics, he sought out these powers rather than getting them by accident. In his search for stronger prey, he met with a “witch doctor” named Calypso, who gave him several herbal potions that enhanced his strength, speed, and senses.

The movie refines that into one incident. A teenage Sergei accompanies his father and brother on a hunting trip in Ghana, and he takes a mortal wound while trying to protect his brother from a lion. A local woman named Calypso gives him a healing serum while she calls for rescue and a mixture of this substance with the lion’s blood grants Sergei his animalistic powers.

Kraven the Hero?

It’s true that the comics have often portrayed Kraven as an antihero, and that he has a strong sense of personal honor that often stops him from committing truly heinous acts. That said, most critics agree that the movie version of Kraven is far more heroic than his counterpart on the page. This hunter is essentially a superhero as far as the world is concerned — protecting wildlife, hunting down criminals, and fighting to protect his family.

This is a problem that the Sony Spider-Man movies have always faced. They can’t use Spider-Man himself, and without him as a foil, his villains have to become the main characters. That means they also need to become much more relatable and likable in order to carry a feature-length film on their own. It’s the nature of these projects, and is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing – so long as they remain in their own continuity.

Abilities

There are some changes to Kraven’s abilities in this movie that raise as many questions as they answer. For one thing, the movie says nothing of his enhanced vitality and slowed aging. This is the explanation for Kraven’s long lifespan in the comics, although movie takes him into the modern day, so it hasn’t come up yet.

More questionable is his apparent gift for influencing animals with some form of telepathy. This is nowhere to be seen in the comics, where he occasionally trains animals the old-fashioned way. However, the movie seems to show him mind-controlling a wolf and later manipulating an entire herd of buffalo. He may also have influenced the bear that he left behind to kill his father.

The Chameleon

Speaking of Kraven’s family, his relationship with Dmitri is very different onscreen than on the page. The comics were the first to introduce Kraven as the half-brother of The Chameleon, a.k.a. Dmitri Smerdyakov. In the 1980s and 90s, creative team J. M. DeMatteis, Mike Zeck, and Bob McLeod made several popular retcons in the storyline “Kraven’s Last Hunt,” and re-examined this brotherly relationship along the way. Their story revealed that Sergei was abusive to Dmitri when they were children, and that has generally been regarded as canon ever since.

Instead, the movie is mostly about Sergei trying to protect Dmitri from the abuse of their father, only to see Dmitri take over the family business in the end. It worked well in the context of the movie, though some fans were disappointed at the missed opportunity to confront sibling-on-sibling abuse in a blockbuster film. This dynamic is not explored as often as parental abuse in pop-culture, so it could have been cathartic for some.

One way or another, it was smart to introduce these two brothers together as Sony was still planning on building out its slate of Marvel-adjacent movies at the time. However, Dimitri Smerdyakov already appeared in the MCU via Spider-Man: Far From Home, played by actor Numan Acar. That might have made future crossovers complicated, but now Sony’s Spider-Man spinoffs franchise is on hold.

Kraven the Hunter is still playing in many theaters around the world. Here in the U.S., it is now available to rent or purchase digitally on PVOD stores like Apple TV, Prime Video and Vudu. So far there’s no word on when it will join a subscription-based streaming service, or plans for a physical media release.