“No, not at all. That never happened. It was possible, maybe if I wanted to kill T’Challa or something. But nothing I wanted to do creatively came into conflict with what Joe and Anthony [Russo] were doing with their film – and I wasn’t encouraged to do anything that strayed from that by the studio either. It was a beautiful situation.”
As the Black Panther movie proves, Ryan Coogler knows his comics – so much so he wanted to stay true to a very particular (and very special) run of issues.
“Being a Marvel fan, you want to grab all the characters. You realise there’s contractual things. You don’t have that character. There was a Christopher Priest run that was pretty heavy, there’s a big scene where Panther’s fighting Kraven, Kraven the Hunter.”
“I’ve always loved Kraven the Hunter in almost every iteration. So there was a moment – ‘Can I grab Kraven?’ – and they were ‘Nah, you don’t have Kraven.’ He was one where I thought ‘Oh, man.’ But I don’t even know if he would have worked in the movie we ended up with, this was the early days.”
Kraven has yet to appear in a Spider-Man film, but he’s one of the character’s most popular villains, first appearing in The Amazing Spider-Man #15 way back in 1964. A crazed big-game hunter who likes going after superheroes named after animals, Kraven is both ridiculous and terrifying.
