Morbius resurrects to die again
#MorbiusSweep refers to parody memes ironically celebrating the 2022 superhero film Morbius as a commercial success despite the movie being largely panned. (Photo: Know Your Meme)
Morbius is a rare movie that bombed twice at the box office. After weeks of Morbin memes dominating the internet after its original release, Sony has once more brought Jared Leto’s living vampire back to life at the theaters this past weekend.
But was it with the cognizance to become the next The Room-style cult classic or did Sony confuse internet mockery as audience demand?
Morbius had its original theatrical release back in April. The Marvel-Sony joint follows Dr. Michael Morbius, a human biologist who accidentally becomes a vampire after trying to cure himself of a deadly disease. It wasn’t a good film, according to the reviews, and it certainly didn’t blow audiences away, raking in only $170 million worldwide. But thanks in part to unauthorized Twitch livestreams of Jared Leto’s obnoxious method acting, Morbius was resurrected as hilarious Morbin’ memes took off.
Even Jared Leto got in on the internet dogpiling—posting himself reading a fake Morbius 2 script written by award-winning author Bartholomew Cubbins (author of Dr. Seuss books). What's unnerving is that the joke was at his expense, it was never the internet laughing with him.
But for as funny as the memes are, they couldn’t save Morbius.
All Morbed out
Sony, the project’s distributor, has made a grand project of making features about a classic Spider-Man villain that doesn’t actually involve Spider-Man at all (think Venom). There is more to Michael Morbius than his run-ins with Peter Parker, and director Daniel Espinosa wanted his film to illustrate that fact. Unfortunately, most everything about Morbius, from its plot and pacing to its lead actors’ performances, feels ill-conceived as The Verge puts it.
According to Forbes, the Jared Leto-led movie pulled in an extra $85,000 on Friday, following a re-release in 1,037 additional theaters as the movie was only available in 83 theaters, during the prior weekend. This brings its domestic earning total to $73.6 million. It is most definitely not Morbin’ Time.
Kotaku critiques the movies as full of nearly impossible-to-follow fight scenes, terrible one-liners, and no chemistry between lead actors Jared Leto and Matt Smith. The narrative itself is also littered with enough plot holes and uninspired visual effects that no amount of Morbius memes could make it a legitimately enjoyable watch. It’s not the movie itself, but rather the experience of watching it with other Twitch chatters, all of you united in ridiculing the cinematic disaster, that makes it tolerable, even fun
As one Twitter user puts it, "Their big mistake was not realising that the most important part of being a Morbius fan is not watching Morbius."
