Even if you’re a Robert Eggers/S. Craig Zahler/Emerald Fennel/Paul Schrader/delete as applicable hipster film school guy, you can’t really deny that the move industry has been completely turned on its head over the past decade thanks to the advent of superhero movies sharing a shared collective universe and the huge audience numbers and profits that have come as a result of that. Of course I mean the MCU there, but at least DC are trying, right? (Sorry DC stans)
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Anyway, the problem that Marvel (and to a lesser extent DC) have steamrollered into at present is that now they’ve made movies about all the ‘good’ heroes that everyone knows, they’re being forced to make ones about lesser known heroes (or in the case of DC, start a completely new universe with ‘The Batman’) and the problem with these lesser known heroes is that they’re lesser known for a reason. Sure, Marvel and Disney have managed to turn C-listers like ‘The Guardians Of The Galaxy’, ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Shang Chi’ into billion dollar franchises, but I think that’s mainly down to the skill of their directors and their rigorous development and marketing departments rather than necessarily the characters themselves, but I think there’s always a lingering doubt whenever one of these guys gets the green light.
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This is where ‘Morbius’ comes in. Billed as ‘the new Marvel legend’ in a somewhat hopeful voiceover at the end of the original trailer, ‘Morbius’ seemed destined for failure even before its release a couple of weeks ago – fittingly on April 1st. The film had already been delayed by over two years due to the pandemic – and then for unknown, unquantifiable reasons that everyone just assumed meant it was shit – before stories about Jared Leto’s creepy method acting began to emerge (he reportedly held up production by insisting on walking around on crutches the whole time to ‘fully embody’ the character) alongside a barrage of terrible reviews. The outlook wasn’t good.
However, despite all this negative publicity ‘Morbius’ still managed to open at number one in the US with a decent taking of $39 million and hit £4 million over here (sadly missing out on the top spot to ‘Sonic The Hedgehog 2 though, bummer) and recouped most of its $85 million budget in its opening weekend thanks to other international markets. We all know money talks, so even with the shit show that has surrounded the release, there’s still a good chance that we might see Leto’s Morbius show up in a sequel – or some kind of team up movie given that quite frankly nonsensical post credits scene.
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Now, nobody is saying that ‘Morbius’ is a stone cold classic – although Tyrese, who plays an FBI agent in the film was briefly fooled by a meme claiming that Martin Scorsese thought it was a masterpiece – but I don’t think it’s deserving of the some of the disdain that it’s received during the past few months. Don’t get me wrong, ‘Morbius’ is a bad movie, but I just don’t think it’s as awful as it’s being made out to be as it kinda treads the line between being ‘so bad it’s good’ and ‘meh’. And I’m gonna tell you why I think this.
Firstly, I think you have to consider the circumstances under which a ‘Morbius’ movie has even been made. It’s been well publicised that Sony hold the rights to the character of ‘Spiderman’ and all those associated with him and that Tom Holland was only allowed to appear in the MCU because of a deal that was struck between the two studios, so you can understand that Sony wants to get in on an even bigger piece of that magic money pie by starting up their own ‘Spiderverse’ based around said characters. It makes perfect sense, but the only problem is that the majority of those characters are dogshit.
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Sure, it was a good move to start with ‘Venom’ because Eddie Brock’s alien symbiote is a genuinely popular antihero comic book character that has held down his own ongoing story and mythology for several years (the movie may have sucked, but again it grossed enough that a sequel was made that was played a lot more for laughs and was actually kinda fun) but after that, where do you turn? There really aren’t that many options except for Michael Morbius and Kraven The Hunter (another movie that’s set to drop in the near future and will probably just be OK) and that’s hardly filling anyone with any confidence.
The sad truth of the matter is that Morbius just isn’t that interesting. Sure, the whole idea of being a living vampire that doesn’t want to drink human blood – or does sometimes depending how bored anyone is with the character – is sorta interesting, but nobody has ever really built a longstanding history of the character for anyone to do anything with. He’s just sorta there, teaming up/fighting Spiderman when nobody else is around.
To illustrate this even further I remember Marvel really pushing a ‘Morbius’ series a few years ago by Joe Keatinge and Richard Elson and I mean really pushing it: there were literally adverts in the back of every other comic, and editors were saying how it was going to be something really special on the letters pages and encouraging people to pick it up. It lasted nine issues and I don’t think Joe Keatinge ever worked for Marvel again.
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So when the source material you start with barely exists (I think there’s been two or three Morbius solo series over the years since his debut back in the 60s) and isn’t very good anyway, where do you go? Even ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’ and ‘Black Panther’ had about a decades worth of comics to look to for inspiration. ‘Morbius’ was on a hiding to nothing straight out of the bat (pun intended).
Bearing all that in mind, I still think that ‘Morbius’ is a fairly admirable attempt at a superhero movie and isn’t anywhere near the worst example the genre. Sure, there are a lot of very strange narrative decisions – Why does Matt Smith’s character Lucien let Morbius give him the nickname Milo the first time they meet that he doesn’t seem to like and NEVER EVER try to change it or correct it over the course of the next thirty years? Why does Jared Harris’ character think that Morbius is such a brilliant scientist that needs to be transposed to a school on another continent because he fixed some crappy looking machine with a pin? Why does Matt Smith get all dressed up for a night partying and then go to a club and order one single shot of tequila? I could go on about these for a hours – and yes, all of those plot points are stupid and dumb, but here’s the thing: I don’t that think they’re any more stupid or dumb than beats that you see in dumb action movies like ‘Face/Off’ and ‘Crank’ which (rightly or wrongly) are regarded as classics of the genre, so maybe ‘Morbius’ should be getting a little more respect here or at least be given a little bit of a break? Sure, I get that those movies came out a long time ago, but I’m fairly certain similar ones still exist at this point in time (maybe that Jake Gyllenhaal movie that just came out ‘Ambulance’? Michael Bay directed it, so you know) that aren’t getting memed to oblivion because of it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGsYw1_3OeE
I suppose one of the problems with Morbius is that both Jared Leto and to a lesser extent Jared Harris are both acting like they think that they’re trying to win an Oscar and this doesn’t help the tone of the film, especially when Matt Smith is the only person who has understood the assignment and is channeling his inner Nicolas Cage for almost the entirety of the movie (best part is definitely when he’s dancing around his room ready to go out, which you can see above). The lack of action in the plot doesn’t really help either SPOILER ALERT *it’s pretty much just Morbius injecting himself with vampire blood to cure his rare blood disease, realising that it makes him into a bit of a superhero/monster that craves human blood, refusing to give the cure to Milo for this reason, Milo taking it anyway and turning into a psycho and killing a few people before Morbius flies around a bit and fights him and stops him* and the special effects weren’t great – mostly just Morbius darting around too quickly to know what was even happening – BUT even underneath that I didn’t think I was mindnumbingly bored throughout it like most of the reviews claimed I would be and I fully expect to see movies that I dislike more this year.
I realise everything I just wrote there does make ‘Morbius’ seem like an absolutely terrible movie (probably that video above below if you watched it) and I’m not saying it’s good by any means, I just think it’s received a bit of a hard rep. Like I said at the start, it’s just a bit ‘meh’ or if you want to upgrade that slightly ‘Morbius’ is perfectly fine.
In fact, if by some miracle it had been made without the Marvel association*, it probably wouldn’t have scored perfect reviews either, but I don’t think it would have been shat on as hard as it has been now. Might have even made it as an under the radar so bad it’s good cult classic. Hell, it’s probably already on its way to doing that anyway. Fair play to the movie for riding through a shit storm.
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The overarching flaw with ‘Morbius’ is just that we expect too much from superhero movies now after the success of the MCU (and even ‘The Batman’ and the more recent ‘Suicide Squad’ I suppose) and if one doesn’t hit the heights of the others, then it’s fair game to absolutely rip it. Even the cool hipster film student I mentioned at the start of this essay will agree that ‘Ant Man’ is a way better, more fully formed movie than Ben Affleck’s attempt at ‘Daredevil’ at the turn of the millennium.
It’s universally accepted that the bar has been raised, but I don’t feel like ‘Morbius’ deserves the abuse that it’s received just because it’s in coming in at the lower end of the gamma radiation scale (or blood fusion scale/whatever Morbius suffers from). If a substandard action movie or romance movie is released, everyone just lets it be and probably doesn’t even go and see it if they think it looks crap: it just gets bad reviews and people get on with their lives and wait for something good to come out and maybe watch it on TV in a few years, rather than make millions of memes about it being awful and I think that’s probably how we should treat ‘Morbius’. Give the guy a break.
Having said that, the negative publicity and memes all over the internet has probably led to more people seeing the movie – I’ll admit I only went to see it for a joke and the cinema was still pretty packed, even two and a half weeks after it was first released – driving up profits and notoriety and almost inevitably leading to another appearance from the living vampire. So essentially by doing all that, you’ve all enabled the legacy of ‘Marvel’s newest legend’. You’ve become what you hated. Just like Michael Morbius.
*Important to note here that Todd Philips’ ‘Joker’ can be viewed as an important take on the declining mental health of problematic men dealing with their roles in a capitalist alpha male society, but that it probably would have never been made without the DC connection. Imagine how well received and under the radar a movie like that would have been? Oh right, yeah I have seen ‘Fight Club’.
