Is there anything left to say about Sony’s Spider-Verse? Never has a fall from grace felt so public, so painful, and so utterly preventable. Sony’s vice grip on the Spider-Man property, and its attempts to maintain it through watered-down superhero movies, is common knowledge at this point. But the studio’s cash grabs were easier to forgive when the memory of Venom — the film meant to set the tone for the Sonyverse — was fresher and more positive. Ten years later, every part of the Sonyverse just feels like an experiment gone wrong. It’s fitting, then, that the studio’s latest effort to reboot its Spider-Man franchise without the hero in question may also be its last.

Kraven the Hunter is no different from the other Sony films made “in association” with Marvel. While it gets some points for its R-rating, it falls prey to the same pitfalls as Madame Web, Morbius, and even the latest Venom movie. With the Sonyverse on its last legs, Kraven had its work cut out for it. There was no world where one film could save an entire franchise, especially one so chaotic as this. No movie is that good. And unfortunately, there’s not a lot of good in Kraven anyway.

A clunky, crowded script, muddy visual effects, and glaringly obvious ADR bog down a promising premise. It’s not camp enough to become a cult classic, and it lacks the conviction to carry its most ambitious ideas to the finish line. In a world where superhero fatigue makes competition all the tougher, it’s survival of the fittest — and it’s ironic that Kraven, of all properties, lacks that killer instinct.

Of all of the internal debates that Machine Games had during the development of its most recent game, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, director Jerk Gustafsson recalls the toughest being about how the iconic archeologist should move. While some team members wanted to make Indy as acrobatic as his gaming contemporaries, others felt a duty to portray him as his creators intended.

“To be honest, that was probably a harder sell internally,” Gustafsson tells Inverse. “I remember reading this quote, I think it was from Spielberg who said ‘Indiana Jones is a non-superhero superhero.’ That became one of the core values of the project. Of course he’s still fit and can handle himself. But he’s also a 35-plus-year-old professor. I had this goal of trying to make it grounded in that way.”

This is just one example of the many conversations the talented Sweden-based team discussed during The Great Circle’s four-year development. The end result is an experience that confidently doubles down on its vision, creating an entirely unique game that doubles as one of 2024’s best.

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