Kraven, Karate Kid and Venom Get the Closeup at New York Comic Con

Sony unveiled new looks at three of its upcoming titles — Venom: The Last Dance, Karate Kid: Legends, and Kraven the Hunter — during an hour-long presentation at this year’s New York Comic Con.

The Friday night panel, which featured appearances by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, director J.C. Chandor, Tom Hardy, Juno Temple, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and director Kelly Marcel, accompanied footage of the opening of Kraven, a trailer for Karate Kid: Legends, and a clip and discussion of what happens when Venom takes over a horse in The Last Dance.  

Chandor kicked the presentation off, teasing that “it’s like an old gangster film, basically this classic kind of journey, but obviously with a little bit of a Marvel spin. This ain’t a peachy Craven. You don’t do it that way. You gotta go brutal with Kraven.”

He added of the Dec. 13 release: “It’s not just Kraven. We’ve really gotten an opportunity to dive into the Marvel characters in a really cool way,” he said. “We wanted to have the spirit of those characters be what fans want and also bring it to the screen in a new way… We’ve walked a tonal balance where myself as a storyteller and as the director, I know the actors in every performance, we’re not breaking the fourth wall. We believe in this story like it was really happening.”

Speaking to the film’s R-rating, he shared an eagerness to go more mature based on the comics.”When you get in those books. It’s pretty, pretty intense. When the studio gave us the opportunity to see if we wanted to do this as an R[-rated] film, we were like, yes,” he said. “It was an amazing opportunity. It sort of opened up some really intense kind of Grindhouse stuff on one side, and then some also really intense character stuff.”

On casting Taylor-Johnson, the director noted there was a real challenge. “To find an actor who has the ability to stand toe-to-toe with a lot of these other actors in the movie, and hold up the chops from a performance standpoint, but also be able to physically move in a way, which is this sort of animalistic dance,” he said. “He was born to play Kraven.”

Johnson, after appearing on stage to wild cheers, spoke about Kraven’s “iconic image,” specifically his physicality. “It’s always interesting playing a villain, and I think it comes with a lot more depth and complexity. He’s real. He’s not an alien, he’s not a visual VFX monster. He’s a man who’s made a choice to be a hunter, a killer. I think that comes with a lot of layers,” he noted. “Kraven is a hunter, not a poacher and as every great hunter knows, sometimes you have to cull the herd to preserve the order. Once you start applying that to human beings, that’s when it becomes a pretty dark story.”

Among the footage teased was the film’s opening, which saw Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven transported to a prison colony. There, Kraven arrives to a boisterous welcome, as fellow prisoners bang on their cages from above before he meets his cellmate, who notes the last guy was there just a month and Kraven promises he’ll only be there a few days. He faces a number of newly made enemies before having a meeting with a leader of one of the colony’s gangs, who — after an exchange of words, traps Kraven inside. That sets off an intense fight sequence featuring Kravev viciously taking out the whole room before taking the fight to the hallways outside, where he eventually breaks free from the prison, climbing its walls before fleeing through the tundra into a wall of snow. 

A second clip showed Kraven arming himself in a house out in the forest, preparing to hunt a number of men with guns shooting the wildlife. That hunt features him using a bear trap to take one of his enemies out, along with a swinging log covered in spikes — all before a helicopter chases him from above. 

Karate Kid was up next, beginning with a trailer that was opened by Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio. Star Ben Wang led much of the footage, which heavily teased the film’s focus on family, fighting and stunt work. “In life you only have one question: Is it worth fighting for it? Or not?” Chan is heard stating. The film opens May 28, 2025 and unites Chan — star of the 2010 Karate Kid movie, and Macchio, who led the original films, as well as the Netflix hit Cobra Kai.

Fans of Venom were treated to new footage from the third installment in the Tom Hardy-led franchise, which has already released a trailer teasing the closing chapter for the symbiotic relationship. During the panel, Hardy reflected on playing the character for over half a decade. “I’ve absolutely loved playing Eddie,” he told the crowd. “It’s been one of the best things in my life so it’ll be sad to see him go.”

Hardy also spoke to how he and director Marcel work together on the films, frequently taking an idea that they go back and forth on, before Marcel teased where the film will take fans. “We find him where we left them at the end of Venom 2,” she teased of the film, which opens next week. “Now they’re fugitives and on the run. The Last Dance is a road trip movie where they’re chased by people from our world and other worlds, and the longer they stay together, the more they realize staying together puts the world in jeopardy.”

Ejiofor and Temple also teased their characters, noting that Ejiofor character “is a military man. He is incredibly stringent and forthright in dealing with these creatures and trying to hold this facility together,” he said. Temple’s character, who shares the facility with him, works on the scientific side, but the two don’t always see eye-to-eye. 

During the panel, Hardy also explained how the team filmed his scenes with Venom in his head, noting it involved multiple earpieces that included a recording of his Venom voice and Marcel’s direction. The duo are generally quite collaborative on and off-screen, including in the writing process of the film, which Hardy explained during the 20-minute presentation. 

“I come up with these fantastic ideas,” Hardy said. “Then what I’ll do is talk at Kelly and I’ll keep talking until Kelly say, ‘that’s enough.’ Then I’m like, ‘Yeah she’s got it.’ Then Kelly goes away and comes back with things I’d never thought to say, but it’s all formatted perfectly, and I pat myself on the back… With Kelly, my ideas turn into something completely different.” 

“That’s about how it goes. There’s some drawings involved as well,” Marcel added. 

Hardy expressed he appreciated their partnership, and celebrated her growth from co-writer to director. “I’ve been working with Kelly for 20-years or something. We started out trying to get our first jobs together. I just want to say she’s super talent. I back her a million percent.

“I’ve been with Tom for seven years on this journey, so these films mean everything to us,” she said of getting to direct for the first time. “I was really grateful to Sony for letting me see this one through inception all the way to the end, especially as the last in the trilogy. It was a beautiful experience, and I really hope it opens doors for more female directors directing male-led action movies.”

Towards the end of the panel, the cast and creative team were asked whether a Spider-Man crossover was in the cards, Marcel said, “I would love to see Venom in Spider-Man but who knows.”

As for whether this is the end of the Venom arc, Marcel and Hardy confirmed it was. “We always saw this as three pictures, and we wanted to tell Eddie and Venom’s story in three movies. The arc for Venom and Eddie closes here. But as we know, there are lots of symbiote stories in the canon, so there’s lots of places to go, and maybe even there are a few Easter eggs in here that might start that journey off,” Marcel teased.