Sony Concedes 'Karate Kid' Can’t Make December Date, Gives It To 'Kraven'
The new franchise-unifying film will now open May 30, 2025 allowing the Spider-Man villain to take his fourth date
Well that’s some Marvel news you weren’t expecting to get today. Sony Pictures has delayed their Spider-Man villain film Kraven the Hunter one more time, from August 30, 2024 to December 13, 2024.
The Columbia Pictures film directed by J.C. Chandor and starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson will now have been delayed nearly 2 years from its originally announced January 13, 2023 release date. It was subsequently moved to October 6, 2023, before landing on the August 30 date in the midst of the strikes that are attributed as the reason for that move. The move to October 6 was announced in September 2022 with a new Karate Kid movie that at the time was reported as a reboot. Things were quiet from them for a while, so much that it too was affected by last summer’s delays, in the same group as Kraven’s previous delay, where it moved from June 7, 2024 to…December 13, 2024.
Indeed, Kraven is taking over The Karate Kid’s release date up against Warner Bros.’s animated The Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim. The franchise-unifying installment as it turned out to be will now open on May 30, 2025. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, considering the casting of its lead wasn’t until February following a global casting call triggered just a couple of weeks after the strikes ended by a video featuring returning stars Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan, reprising their respective roles as Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Han from differing ends of the franchise. Ben Wang was cast as the lead, and the casting of Sadie Stanley, Joshua Jackson and Ming Na were revealed a little over a week later. Earlier in April the film added two more Marvel Cinematic Universe alums in Aramis Knight (Ms. Marvel’s Red Dagger) and Wyatt Oleff (young Peter Quill in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies). Even then, meeting the December release date was highly unrealistic. It is directed by Jonathan Entwistle, the man whose past work includes I’m Not Okay with This and The End of the F***ing World and, as it should be reiterated once again, is supposed to be shepherding the new phase of the Power Rangers franchise.
Kraven the Hunter in its new spot will have IMAX and PLF screens, and has Sony betting that they’ll be able to replicate previous Spider-Man successes for that holiday time of year, following Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and No Way Home. The film’s screenplay is by Art Marcum & Matt Holloway and Richard Wenk, with a cast that also includes Russell Crowe as dad Nikolai Kravinoff, Ariana DeBose as Calypso, the voodoo priestess, along with Fred Hechinger as Dmitri Smerdyakov aka Chameleon, Alessandro Nivola and Christopher Abbott as main villain the Foreigner.
Despite the Karate Kid film being punted out, the 2024 release calendar is not further thinned by such absence. Sony has added They Listen from Columbia Pictures and Blumhouse in the August 30, 2024 slot Kraven vacates with this move. The film stars John Cho, Katherine Waterston, Havana Rose Liu and Lukita Maxwell, with David Dastmalchian and Keith Carradine.
