Why Carnage and Kraven are the Villains SPIDER-MAN Needs
As much as I've enjoyed all the Spider-Man movies that have been made, our hero has yet to fight a truly evil villain. Every villain that Spider-Man has gone up against in the movies so far have had emphatic back stories that led them to being a villain. Most of them were all virtually nice guys until life didn't pan out the way they wanted it to. So along with making stupid decisions and being at the wrong place at the wrong time, they went bad. If that's how a villain is born, then I imagine a lot of us should technically have turned into a villain by now.
Here are the examples of what we've seen in the previous films.
In Sam Raimi's first Spider-Man movie, Norman Osborn experiments on himself with an unstable performance-enhancing chemical vapor that is supposed to make him faster and stronger. It ends up turning him into an insane person. He becomes the Green Goblin only because he's being affected by the drug, and he's not himself.
In Spider-Man 2, Doctor Octavious' wife is killed because he doesn't shut his experiment down when he should have. The neural inhibitor chip which keeps his mechanical arms from influencing his mind is destroyed, and the arms are fused to his spine. They basically take over his brain, and he's not really responsible for his actions.
In Spider-Man 3, Harry Osborn turns bad because his dad was killed by Spider-Man. Eddie Brock turns to the dark side because Peter exposed him as a fraud with his doctored photos showing Spider-Man as a criminal. Jameson fires Brock. Then he's infected with the symbiote that turns him into Venom, which is perfect because now it's easier for him to try and get revenge. Then there's Flint Marko/Sandman who's already a criminal, but not really that insane until he falls into a particle accelerator that fuses his body with surrounding sand. The guy just wanted to help his daughter who had cancer.
In Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man, Doctor Conners just wanted to grow himself an arm. So what does he do? He injects himself with a drug that is supposed to help regenerate limbs. Of course it turns him into The Lizard and makes him go crazy.
In The Amazing Spider-Man 2 a somewhat mentally challenged genius is all happy-go-lucky until he's electrocuted and falls into a water tank full of electric eels that attack him. Then he just wants people to notice him. The best way to do that is to be bad. Then there's Harry, who, like almost everyone else, injects himself with a serum that turns him into an even bigger ass-hole.
So as you can see, everyone here becomes a villain making stupid-ass decisions, and then blame Spider-Man for all of their problems. Spider-Man needs a true villain. Someone with a dark heart from the very beginning who would put the fear of God into the hero. We need to see Spider-Man fear for his life. A perfect example of this kind of villain would be Batman's Joker, a guy who just wants to watch the world burn.
In a recent interview with CBM, Marc Webb was asked about which unused Spider-Man villain he would be interested in exploring and this was his reply:
"Kraven. Kraven. I like the idea of Kraven. The Vulture. Ock. I always thought the idea of Mysterio was interesting. Maybe Scorpion. But really, Kraven I think is kind of interesting."
Kraven is definitely an interesting choice, and one that I hope Webb actually ends up using. Kraven (a.k.a. Sergei Kravinoff) is described as a "maniacal big game hunter who seeks to defeat Spider-Man to prove that he is the greatest hunter in the world. Unlike other hunters, he typically disdains the use of guns or bow and arrows, preferring to take down large dangerous animals with his bare hands. He also lives by a code of honor of sorts, choosing to hunt his game fairly. He consumes a mystical serum to give himself enhanced strength and dramatically slow the aging process."
Basically Kraven just wants to hunt Spider-Man for sport. He's not out for revenge, the serum he takes doesn't make him crazy in the head, this is just how he is. He wants Spidey's head mounted on his wall just to prove he's better. He's a person that has always been kind of twisted in the head. This would be a complete nightmare for Spider-Man.
Another villain that Spider-Man needs to fight is Carnage (a.k.a. Cletus Kasady). That guy is a complete psychopath and a homicidal sadist. This is the darkest villain in the world of Spider-Man. When he was a kid he killed his grandma by pushing her down a flight of stairs, and tried to murder his mother by throwing a television into her bathtub. While spending several abusive years in a detention center for boys he's said to have acquired his philosophy that "life was essentially meaningless and futile, that 'laws are only words', and came to see the spreading of chaos through random, unpatterned bloodshed as 'the ultimate freedom.'" So he became a serial killer.
Kasady eventually becomes Carnage and Spider-Man's most powerful and deadly enemy. In the comics Spider-Man couldn't beat Carnage alone so he made a truce with Venom to help take him down. I really hope that Carnage eventually makes his way to the big screen. Carnage is Spider-Man's Joker, and it needs to happen. It would be the biggest mistake for Sony Pictures not to introduce him in their cinematic universe.
I want to see Spider-Man fight a truly insane villain on the big screen. So far, everything that's been done and everything that they have lined up isn't going to fulfill that satisfaction that I'm looking for. There's a good chance that we'll see Kraven make his appearance in the Sinister Six movie being made. I just hope that it's done right. As far as Carnage goes, if they ever do bring him in, it won't happen for a long time. At least not until after they release that Venom movie they are developing.
Which of Spider-Man's villains do you think are his greatest adversaries?
