Image: Marvel Studios

For a Marvel fan, the opportunity to play in the MCU sandbox must be a thrill. Think of all the characters yet to be introduced! Director Ryan Coogler recently revealed the one character he wished he could have included in Black Panther, and it’s a good one.


“Being a Marvel fan, you want to grab all the characters,” Coogler told Yahoo! Movies. “There was a Christopher Priest run that was pretty heavy, there’s a big scene where Panther’s fighting Kraven, Kraven the Hunter.”

Kraven the Hunter, introduced introduced as a Spider-Man villain in The Amazing Spider-Man #15 (1964), is an obsessive big-game hunter who has indeed tangled with T’Challa before. “I’ve always loved Kraven the Hunter in almost every iteration,” Coogler explained. “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.”


Sony’s Spider-Man films likely left Kraven off the table, or maybe Marvel just wants to keep him in their back pockets for a Spidey-exclusive introduction. At any rate, it’s a shame that Coogler didn’t get a chance to toy with the idea. Black Panther vs. Kraven the Hunter? That’s a fight I want to see on-screen.

[Yahoo! Movies]