Aaron Taylor-Johnson is going from Kick-Arse to Quicksilver to Kraven the Hunter. The former Avengers star has been cast as the frequent Spider-Man villain in a Sony Marvel production directed by J.C. Chandor and set for release January 13, 2023.
Sony announced the news in a press release Wednesday afternoon. Kraven the Hunter will be a standalone villain film, much like Venom, and the upcoming sequel Let There Be Carnage and Morbius. Meaning, we’ll see him more as the anti-hero he’s often portrayed to be in the comics, with a potential for a crossover with Spider-Man, but no guarantees. (The trailer for both of those films have had weird, confusing nods back to old Spider-Man movies.) The script is by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway and Richard Wenk.
With this casting Taylor-Johnson becomes one of the most fascinating actors to ever play a superhero role. As previously mentioned, he rose to prominence as the lead role in Kick-Arse, which then saw him in the sequel Kick-Arse 2. Later, he was cast as Pietro Maximoff, opposite Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff, in Avengers: Age of Ultron, only to die in that film and see his sister rise to huge popularity and her own show, WandaVision. Then, just when you thought he might make a return, his character returned on WandaVision, but he was played by Evan Peters, who played the same role in the X-Men universe.
Now, he’s playing a villain in an off-shoot Sony universe, which may crossover with the Marvel Studios films or may not. We’ll learn more about that in the coming months with the release of Venom 2 and Morbius. But then, pretty soon after, we’ll get Kraven, and that’s gonna be very interesting.