It’s a relatively well known fact that Marvel doesn’t own the rights to one of their most successful characters, Spider-Man. They got into some financial difficulties in the late nineties – that even saw them go bankrupt - which led them to selling the film and television rights to Sony in 1999.

Sony, of course, have since produced a number of Spidey flicks since Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, which had gone on to be a hugely profitable franchise, outside of the MCU.

But Sony don’t just own Spider-Man, they also own characters associated with him, and although it took them a while to getting them on the big screen, that’s why we recently had the Venom trilogy, as well as the recent Madame Web.

And now it’s the turn of Sergei Nikolaevich Kravinoff AKA Kraven the Hunter.

On a hunting trip are young brothers Sergei and Dmitri, with their father Nikolai (Russell Crowe). They are in search of big game, and find it, when Sergei is attacked by a lion and dragged away. But instead of killing him, he leaves him to be found by Calypso, a young girl who just so happens to be in the vicinity, as well as have a serum given to her by her grandmother, which saves Sergei’s life.

Now a grown man, and going by the name Kraven the Hunter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), as that serum seemingly gave him special powers, making him physically strong. He decides that he will try to right the wrongs of his father, who is a drug trafficker, by going through a list of bad guys and assassinating him.

But things get very personal when his half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is kidnapped, and Kraven decides that those who have taken him, must pay.

He can’t do it alone however, so he tracks down Calypso (Ariana DeBose), now living in London as a lawyer, to help him out.

Kraven may well be on the hunt, doing what he does best, but he’s unaware that he’s being hunted himself.

With Spider-Man not swinging back onto our screens anytime soon, Sony have been keen to explore other characters, such as the recent Madame Web, which they probably wish they didn’t after that flopped spectacularly. But that couldn’t happen twice, could it?

Well it can, and did, with Kraven the Hunter, made for around $120 million, only making half of that back at the box office.

In fairness, it’s not a terrible film. It’s not great, but not unwatchable. The main issue has to be that it’s not Spider-Man. And even though he’s part of Spidey’s world, there’s no mention of him here.

He is portrayed as a hero figure, and yet, in the comics, he’s always been a foe of Peter Parker’s, being as he is a founding member of the Sinister Six, who all want to bring Spider-Man down.

But you can’t really feed into that without an origins tale, which this is. And if you get that wrong, as director J.C. Chandor has here, there’s nothing to build on.

And although it was brave to not even mention Spider-Man, it also showed a great deal of naivety, thinking audiences would simply buy into this Marvel character through association, which isn’t even there in the film. And they didn’t.

Taylor-Johnson has had a curious career to date; although he found fame in the Kick-Ass films, he hasn’t done anything yet to push his career on, and sadly this won’t help. That said, there are growing rumours, fuelled recently by none other than Danny Boyle, with Taylor-Johnson starring in his upcoming 28 Years Later, that he “may or may not be the next Bond”. And there’s no denying he would be a good fit.

Chandor tries to inject a certain amount of violence, which the character calls for, but it’s all a little too timid for the family audience it’s aimed at.

The bottom line is, Kraven is simply a character that audiences could care less about, without any Spider-man connection. And the box office proved that.

It also doesn’t help that Chandor didn’t present his story in an engaging fashion, and in doing so pretty much puts a bullet in Kraven’s head and ending any further opportunities to explore the character’s story arc. That’s not to say a Sinister Six film isn’t on the cards however, so there’s still hope there.

Although Taylor-Johnson does well in bringing the character to life, the lacklustre direction and flimsy script looks like another Sony character to bite the dust.