I think at this point the Sonyverse Marvel movies are one of my biggest guilty pleasures (although guilty is not how I feel in enjoying them). There is something about this trilogy – Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter – that baffles in a way that I find more enjoyable than the vast majority of studio franchises. I'd watch this 10 times before a rewatch of Wicked or an MCU movie. I just find everything about this unholy trilogy to be fascinating. On a basic level, they are trashy corporate products designed to make Sony extra money while they still hold the rights to the non-Spidey characters in the Spider-Man universe. Kraven is probably the most famous of these three (obviously Venom is part of this too, but Venom is both famous and well-made enough to generate actual audiences) but only widely known among Spider-Man fans. So there's something tangible about the core of this one that Madame Web did not have. Madame Web will forever be the greatest of these because its marketing and even actual narrative were designed to manipulate people (including the cast!) into thinking this was a Spider-Woman movie instead of being about some future-seeing lady who has no spider powers at all? Kraven is less bizarre on this level, but it's comparable to its two predecessors in terms of sheer incompetence. At least with the two 2024 releases, there are occasional flashes of style (like with the repeated web imagery in Madame Web) or beauty in visuals (some of the blowing blades of grass & wide shots are rather nice here) that MCU movies would never dare attempt. At the same time, many of the CGI and other effects are laughably terrible, to the point where it's hard to believe this was released in this state. The MCU, like the McDonald's of movies, produces an ugly but consistent product designed to tickle dopamine receptors without modifying the recipe. They have plotting down to a science, which is something the Sony movies seem to actively despise. The only time there's ever really a narrative drive is when Dimitri gets kidnapped, and even then motivations are so simultaneously generic and incomprehensible that it still feels like there's not yet a plot in motion. There are suggestuons of character development like with the occasional gesture toward the ethics of Kraven's violence and basically every line from Russell Crowe, but at no point do we ever have a sense of the stakes for these characters. I'm particularly fond of how this impressive ensemble of talented actors is forced to turn in fine performances that seem like career nadirs because it is impossible to deliver this dialogue and make it sound good. Everything about these movies feels like they've been teleported in from a universe where the MCU never existed. They feel so much more like descendants of Daredevil and Electra, only without the aggressively early 2000s aesthetics. Some of the extreme violence in Kraven (e.g. the bear trap) reminds you of when this was made, but this is the closest we really get today to that era of dumb, trashy superhero movies. It's very clearly terrible, but there's enough moments that are genuinely cool (or at least fun) to make this eminently watchable.