Away from the Hype: MORBIUS

If Morbius is remembered at all, it will be as the movie that flopped twice. Released on April Fool’s Day 2022, it grossed only $167m against a budget of $83m. For a superhero tentpole movie, this is a disaster. This happened for many reasons.

The most obvious is that Morbius The Living Vampire isn’t exactly a household name. The character is a second or third tier Spider-Man villain that has never appeared in live action before. As much as the marketing tried to tie Morbius into the MCU with trailers featuring a poster of Spider-Man in the back of one scene and the appearance of Michael Keaton‘s Vulture, he was still an unknown quantity.

Another reason is superhero fatigue. Writing this in July 2023, there have been more superhero movies flopping than succeeding recently especially outside of the MCU. DC wiping it’s slate and having to release a bunch of movies that have no bearing on the future of the cinematic universe is always going to hurt but the MCU is also feeling the burn with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania struggling to break even.

Finally, Jared Leto. His last foray into comic book movies was as the incredibly disliked Joker in one of the worst superhero movies of recent years: Suicide Squad. And in my personal opinion, the guy isn’t a great actor and allegedly not a great human being either. 

With all that going for it, it was not shocking the movie got critically eviscerated and made no money.

But then, the internet decided that Morbius would become the meme de jour with the joke being that actually people were excited about the movie and that it was a masterpiece. The enduring joke that has passed onto pretty much every subsequent movie is that the best part of the movie is when Morbius says, “It’s Morbin’ time.” Now I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it won’t happen.

When the trailer for the similarly doomed Kraven the Hunter came out, the top comment was to the effect of “I can’t wait until he says it’s Kravin’ time!” The internet is bad for many things, but stupid jokes that somehow get funnier with age is not one of them.

Unfortunately for Morbius, Sony execs assumed that this meme situation meant that Morbius was developing a cult following so they released in cinemas thinking they could recoup some cash now that there was a fervent fanbase – but they were incredibly wrong and the movie earned $300,000.

So now, two flops in, let’s see how Morbius stands up away from the hype.

Morbius

It’s fascinating to watch a movie that doesn’t contain a single original idea. Nothing here is new or clever. It is just a string of tropes and scenes from other movies cobbled together into a stick-thin plot that we’ve seen dozens of times before in other superior origin story movies. It all feels perfunctory, like a chore that needs to be done before they can make sequels with the character established. It’s lazy in a way that is almost offensive to the viewer’s intelligence and wallet when they trot out scene after scene of stuff we’ve seen before like:   

The cops were one is serious, the other is goofy. The mentor/father figure character is played by a distinguished character actor. The sick child that is apparently the doctor’s only patient. A sickly weak character suddenly becoming ripped after gaining powers. A vampire who has to fight the urge to drink blood. Blood dripping on someone’s hand so they look up and get killed. “I’m hungry, you don’t wanna see me when I’m hungry”. A Keyser Soze-esque handicapped walk into a fully ambulant one. A scene in a bar where a loudmouth gets his comeuppance. A vampire perched on the edge of a building like a gargoyle. A character gets a superficial cut that bleeds enough to cause a vampire to nearly frenzy until they get their hunger under control, etc. etc. 

On and on it goes with not a single moment where a viewer might be shocked, challenged, or impressed.

The movie only comes to life when Matt Smith is there. He’s having fun and mixing it up whereas Jared Leto is so utterly serious and humorless that you never feel attached to his character. When Smith‘s character, Milo, gains vampire powers the scenes between him and Leto really showcase the difference between an actor trying to capital A act and a performer having a blast making a superhero movie. 

Don’t get me wrong, you can do both. The superhero genre is full of thespians who treat the goofy material seriously but they do it with a glint in their eye. Leto treats the lighter material like he’s reading a eulogy or he’s an alien who has only read about humour in books. Consider Christian Bale in the Dark Knight trilogy. He is the straight man against the fantastical villains but never comes across as boring or bored. He can brood and deliver a one liner with equal skill.

There’s none of that here. The material doesn’t help and performers like Jared Harris and Adria Arjona (excellent as Bix in Andor) struggle and fail to rise above their thankless mentor and love interest roles respectively. There is no nuance and no gray with any characters. They could replace character’s names with Cop 1, Mentor, Thug, Cop 2, and it would make no difference as each one is an archetype and not a person.

And obviously the ending is a big CGI fight scene that culminates in the arrival of bats Batman Begins did better. 

Conclusion

The more we see shared cinematic universes fail, the more inclined I am to believe that the massive success of the MCU was a huge fluke. The Dark Universe, DCEU, and Sony’s Spider-Man Universe have all failed to match up the Marvel movies with the Dark Universe not even surviving its first outing. 

2008’s Iron Man was not billed as the beginning of anything. It was Marvel’s first foray as a studio and the Nick Fury post-credit scene was very much added as a fun idea rather than a mission statement. By starting slow and building they have been able to take over the cinematic landscape, leaving other shared universes struggling to replicate their success.

What these other universes seemingly don’t have is an X factor that in 2007 was probably seen more as a hindrance than the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry that would eclipse all other genres: Robert Downey Jr. 

Iron Man made Downey Jr a bigger movie star than he had ever been before and gave the MCU a character fans loved and who could deliver that serious stuff alongside quips and derring-do. He managed to sell the world on Iron Man, a character who a lot of people thought was a robot because outside of the comics, no one knew who he was. And, to digress slightly, his death in Endgame has robbed the MCU of a lot of its spark that it is struggling to regain as no other character has quite connected with audiences the way his Tony Stark did. 

So what does this have to do with Morbius? Well, Morbius was a double failure at the box office because its lead is boring, its plot is derivative, and its marketing tried its damnedest to trick audiences into thinking they needed to watch the movie or fall behind on their Marvel movies, which wasn’t the case at all. 

Leto’s woodenness is amazing to me considering he is an actor known for being a bit out there. His Joker, Paolo Gucci, and Niander Wallace are all interesting and challenging in different ways for good or ill, but his Morbius is just nothing. I can’t see why Arjona’s character would want to spend more than five minutes with him, let alone be his love interest. 

This boring-ass performance is thrown into a stark spotlight when compared to Matt Smith who is letting loose and having a ball. He is given nothing particularly mind-blowing to work with but he finds a way to make it compelling to watch. Compare Leto’s discovery of his powers/newfound health is all expressionless brooding to Smith’s dancing around shirtless in a pair of knackered trainers, preening his new body and loving every second of it. 

In the end, there’s a reason why Gen Z decided that the funniest thing they could say about it was that it was good, with their almost supernatural grasp of irony they can see that of all the things this movie is, good is not even remotely one of them.

Watch Morbious