From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the weekly Superhero Movie Rewatch. In this latest revisit we’ve covered some older movies—It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!, Mandrake, and the two Timecop movies—and three more recent releases—Spider-Man: No Way Home, The King’s Man, and The Batman. Now we look at Morbius.
Michael Morbius was created during a particularly entertaining run of The Amazing Spider-Man in 1971 by Roy Thomas & Gil Kane. Peter Parker had created a serum that was intended to remove his spider-powers, but instead it gave him four extra arms, so he now had eight limbs just like a spider. While searching for a cure, he comes across a creature with white skin named Morbius, who appears to be a vampire.
Morbius was an attempt to create a “scientific” vampire. Dr. Michael Morbius suffered from a rare blood disease, and his attempt to cure himself resulted him becoming a mutated creature who subsists on blood.
Over the years, he’s been both villain and vigilante. He’s headlined his own series in 1992 (by Len Kaminski, Gregory Wright, Lisa Trusiani, Ron Wagner, Isaac Cordova, Nick Napolitano, Craig Gilmore, & Fabio Laguna) and 2013 (by Joe Keatinge, Richard Elson, & Valentine De Landro), and continued to be a supporting character in Spider-Man’s titles for five decades.
Originally the character was intended to appear in Wesley Snipes’ Blade trilogy at the turn of the century, but the part was cut. Morbius was considered by Jon Watts to be in Spider-Man: Far From Home, but they wound up going with Mysterio instead.
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Nona the Ninth
While Sony’s plans for a “Spider-Man Cinematic Universe” were torpedoed by the poor performance of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 at the box office and the subsequent renting of the character to Disney and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sony has continued to develop “Spider-adjacent” films, with two Venom movies, this, and planned Silver Sable and Sinister Six films.
Sony originally approached Antoine Fuqua to direct, but he turned it down, as did F. Gary Gray. Daniel Espinosa eventually got the gig. Production was delayed while the studio waited to see how Venom performed in 2018, and then once the film was done, its release was, like so many movies, delayed by the apocalypse of 2020, finally hitting theatres in spring 2022.
Jared Leto, previously seen in this rewatch in Suicide Squad, was the first person cast in the title role, and he had a say in who would direct. He’s joined by the Eleventh Doctor his own self, Matt Smith, as a version of another “scientific vampire,” Hunger, here recast as Morbius’ childhood friend Milo; Adria Arjona as Martine Bancroft, Morbius’ fiancée and assistant in the comics, just the latter here, though they do smooch a few times; Jared Harris as Emil Nicholas, a version of Emil Niklos from the comics, changed from Morbius’ childhood friend (a role given to Smith’s Milo in the movie) to his mentor; and Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal as a couple of FBI agents chasing after Morbius. (Gibson’s Simon Stroud is loosely based on a comics character of the same name who is a mercenary.) Back from Spider-Man: Homecoming is Michael Keaton as Adrian Toomes, who shifts from the MCU to the Sony universe thanks to the shenanigans in Spider-Man: No Way Home during the credits.
The movie did not do well at the box office, and an attempt to bring it back to theatres was an abject failure, as it did even worse the second time. Sony was trying to cash in on the Internet memes that were proliferating about the movie, perhaps not realizing that those memes were almost entirely negative toward the film…
“You don’t wanna see me when I’m hungry”
Morbius
Written by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless
Directed by Daniel Espinosa
Produced by Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, Lucas Foster
Original release date: April 1, 2022
In Costa Rica, Dr. Michael Morbius, who is suffering from a blood disease that leaves him pale, thin, and barely able to walk, sets a trap for a cave full of vampire bats in order to capture them and bring them back to his lab in New York.
We then flash back to twenty-five years earlier. Morbius is a patient at a special hospital run by Dr. Emil Nicholas. Morbius’ blood disease requires a transfusion three times a day. His latest bedmate—all of whom Morbius has renamed “Milo” regardless of their given name—is Lucien, a young man from a wealthy family. Morbius saves Milo’s life at one point when one of the machines he’s plugged into fails.
Nicholas sends Morbius to a school for gifted youngsters in New York (no indication as to whether or not the headmaster is a bald guy in a wheelchair…). Morbius eventually becomes a famous scientist for his development of artificial blood. He actually turns down a Nobel Prize because the point of the artificial blood was to cure his own condition, at which it failed, and he didn’t feel right accepting a prize for a failure. His colleague, Dr. Martine Bancroft, gives him all manner of shit for that, as people like to write checks to Nobel laureates.
Morbius is trying to use the DNA of vampire bats to cure his and Milo’s condition. Milo has been underwriting the research, which is probably what paid for the trip to Costa Rica—which Morbius didn’t tell Bancroft about initially. Once tests succeed on a mouse, he is ready to move on to human subjects—specifically himself.
Because the experiment he’s going to perform isn’t entirely legal, he uses Milo’s money to hire a boat, filled with mercenaries, to test the treatment on himself. Once they’re in international waters, Morbius gives himself the treatment.
While it does give him robustness and strength and stuff, as hoped, it also gives him an insatiable desire to feed on blood, a mutated physical form (including sharp teeth), super-strength, incredible speed, and echolocation. The mercenaries are not happy about this transformation, and go to attack him (rendering Bancroft unconscious when she tries to stop them). Morbius kills all of the mercs, then comes back to himself after draining all of them of blood. He has no memory of what happened, and when he views the surveillance footage, he is appalled, and wipes out the footage and abandons ship.
He continues to work in secret in his lab, and also sneaks into the hospital to check on one of his patients. One of the nurses is found exsanguinated, and Morbius is stopped by the FBI and arrested. (Agent Rodriguez comments that this is the craziest thing they’ve seen since San Francisco.)
Morbius has no memory of killing the nurse, and indeed she was his friend and colleague.
Milo visits Morbius under the guise of being his lawyer, but when he departs, he leaves behind some of the treatment—and also his cane. To Morbius’ horror, he realizes that Milo has also taken the treatment. Morbius drinks from the bag Milo left behind, which increases his strength enough to break out. He catches up to Milo, who admits to being the one who killed the nurse. Unwilling to fight his best friend, Morbius runs away and seeks out Bancroft.
Bancroft has recovered from her coma and told the FBI that she doesn’t remember what happened on the boat. Morbius intimidates some counterfeiters into giving him their lab and he continues his work. (How a counterfeiting lab can be repurposed to a biochemical lab is left as an exercise for the viewer.)
He synthesizes a cure that he intends to use on both Milo and himself. For his part, Milo is still going around killing people, including some jerks in a bar parking lot, which is captured on camera. The FBI agents realize that there’s another vampire around, and they release the footage to the media. Nicholas sees this on the news and immediately goes to see Milo, who slices open his guts and leaves him to bleed out. Nicholas calls Morbius to warn him, and while Morbius tries (and fails) to save Nicholas, Milo goes to Morbius’ lab and wounds Bancroft.
When Morbius makes it back home to a dying Bancroft, she offers her own blood to power him up, which he reluctantly accepts, draining her. He then goes after Milo, and they have a big-ass fight, ending with Morbius giving him the cure, killing him. But instead of giving it to himself, he flies off with a bunch of vampire bats, er, somehow.
While Morbius buggers off to be a fugitive, Bancroft wakes up with red eyes…
The skies go all purple, and then Adrian Toomes appears in an empty cell. He’s released, and later manages to cobble together his Vulture outfit, er, somehow, despite having no resources or identity in this universe, and then finds Morbius, er, somehow and suggests they team up.
“You’re right—I’m up to something”
This movie came under fire for being terrible, and that’s honestly giving it too much credit. I went into it expecting it to be a trash fire or a so-bad-it’s-good goof-fest, but it’s not even able to manage that. It’s just kinda, y’know, there.
I suppose I shouldn’t have had high expectations from the guy who gave us the least interesting Joker ever, but even those expectations were not met. Leto is spectacularly dull in this movie, giving us absolutely nothing to hang onto.
Well, okay, not absolutely nothing. His banter with Matt Smith’s Milo is fun in the early parts of the movie, before the plot kicks in, and if the movie was just Leto and Smith limping through Manchester-disguised-as-New York and snarking at each other, it would’ve been a lot more fun. But that’s dispensed with in fairly short order, and most of the movie is a desultory checking off of all the boxes of an action-adventure movie, and doing so in as sodden a manner as possible. For instance, I knew Milo was going to kill Nicholas pretty much from the nanosecond it was established that Nicholas was the adult Milo’s caretaker, which was less than an hour into the film, and since neither Jared Harris nor the script bothered to imbue him with any kind of personality, it was hard to give a damn when the inevitable finally happened.
I will give Smith credit for trying his best. He chows down on every piece of scenery he can get his hands on as Milo, and I particularly like his awkward white-guy dancing, showing us how Milo is reveling in being able-bodied for the first time in his life. And at least we know where he stands. Leto’s Morbius winds up being neither fish nor fowl. He’s not edgy enough to be the rebel the script tries to portray him as, he’s not noble enough to be the hero the plot keeps trying to maneuver him toward (in particular his mass murder of a boat full of mercenaries is kicked under the bed in the hopes that we’ll forget it ever happened), and he’s not evil enough to be a bad guy (Milo gets to do all the cool bad-guy stuff).
And then the part I was seriously looking forward to, the appearance of Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, turns out to be a whole lot of nothing. The tie-in to No Way Home is not convincing (wasn’t everyone supposed to be restored to their own universe at the end?), and the attempt to tease a Sinister Six movie falls incredibly flat.
After all the internet memes and the twice-bombing theatrical runs, I was hoping at least for a movie I could enjoy ripping apart, but Morbius can’t even get that right…
Next week we conclude this rewatch revival with Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Keith R.A. DeCandido urges everyone to support the Kickstarter for Thrilling Adventure Yarns 2022, an anthology of pulp-style stories edited by Robert Greenberger. Keith will have a story in it called “Ticonderoga Beck and the Stalwart Squad.” Among the other contributors are Greg Cox (who wrote a Morbius story in The Ultimate Spider-Man anthology in 1994) and comics writers Peter David, Geoffrey Thorne, Alex Segura, Paul Kupperberg, Bart Sears & Michelle Sears, Mark Verheiden, Will Murray, and Deadpool co-creator Fabian Nicieza. There’s also a new story by Lester Dent, the creator of Doc Savage, plus tales by Raymond Benson, Jody Lynn Nye, Jean Rabe, Michael Jan Friedman, and tons more! Check it out and please consider supporting it!
Should I do it?
It’s bad.,
Really.
Well somebody’s got to…
(Living) Vampiers…
SUCK!
*I am so very ashamed of myself*
[Fun fact about the character: Gil Kane patterned him on actor Jack Palance. A year later when they started The Tomb of Dracula Gene Colan also patterned the good Count on Palance. The year after that Palance actually played Dracula in a movie!]
I think it’s telling that Avi Arad has the producer credit on this movie, not Amy Pascal. I have much more faith in Pascal as a movie maker than Arad.
Steve: I’m not sure (one way or the other) how much you can read into that. Arad’s producer credit may have as much to do with the fact that this movie has been in some form of development going all the way back to the days when Arad was the producer of everything Marvel-related……
But you could be right. Pascal’s track record is, at the very least, a bit stronger….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I always had the sense that Avi Arad was more of an “owns the movie rights” executive producer, like Michael Uslan for Batman, than the kind who actually participates in the creative process. But if he’s actually a producer producer here — which, in the inverse of television, is a more important credit in a feature film than executive producer — then I don’t know what his role is.
Anyway, I haven’t liked either of the Jared Leto performances I’ve seen (the Joker and the guy in the Blade Runner sequel), and he seemed incredibly bland in the trailers for this, plus I’ve never been that interested in Morbius as a character. And the Toomes cameo seems as pointless as the Eddie Brock cameo in No Way Home. So I’m content to give this one a miss.
I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t comment. But the 1992 “Morbius The Living Vampire” series was not a miniseries. It ran for 32 issues. Although only the first 18 or so were any good and even then in a 90s sorta way. Part of the confusion might be that Len was only writing on the first six issues (the best issues by the way).
tarbis: Ugh, research fail on my part. It’s fixed. Yay edit function!
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It’s not important given the conclusion, and I haven’t seen the film, but do you mean that Morbius “becomes a famous scientist”?
A whole Nobel Prize is about $1 million currently, so… I suppose if they offer half a one, you could say no, but you plan to finish the work and get the jackpot next time. Also, you tend to get it for something you did a couple of decades ago anyway, for reasons.
Robert Carnegie: Yes, I meant that he becomes a famous scientist. It’s, like, a plot point and everything. As for the Nobel Prize stuff, fidelity and accuracy is not this movie’s watchword by any means…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
A movie that proves even tax write-offs can still be shown in theaters.
krad: as it’s written, the review seems to say that Nicholas becomes a famous scientist.
Keith – you’re not going to do Thor: Love and Thunder after Dr. Strange?
Re: Morpheus becoming a famous scientist, we’ve updated the wording slightly, there.
The movie is very much Meh! isn’t it?
Kalvin: I’m saving Thor for the end-of-year iteration of the rewatch.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Screenwriters Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless already wrote a reasonably functional conflicted vampire-themed superhero origin in Dracula Untold. This one doesn’t even have a giant hand made of bats.
@15/craigoxbrow: Given that Sazama and Sharpless were the showrunners of Netflix’s excellent Lost in Space reboot, I have to wonder just how heavily their script for Morbius was rewritten by uncredited authors or hacked apart in editing.
Ugh. This film was the biggest waste of a movie ticket. At least the Venom films had personality. I really don’t get how a performer as versatile and expressive as Leto is able to make the character this bland and boring. The film fails to commit to the darker side of Morbius, and fails just as much at making him a hero. Boring, generic and with no visual flair. This feels like a ’90s budget superhero film done by committee (or possibly A.I.) with the most bland 3 act structure.
At this point, Sony is doing itself no favors in its attempts at generating Sinister Six interest. It’s stumbling as badly as the DCEU in that regard.
@4/Christopher: As I understand, Avi Arad was always a producer on both the business and creative senses. Ever since the X-Men animated series in the ’90s. But in terms of producing job titles on feature films, he was only credited as an EP on the MCU Spider-Man films (presumably since they were joint ventures between Sony and Marvel Studios, and Pascal/Feige were the top dogs on those films). On every other superhero film he worked on, he’s always credited as a producer, through his production company, Arad Productions (which he formed after separating himself from Marvel Studios in 2006).
But being an executive producer on a feature film is more fluid than the name implies. There are those like Uslan who are named because of rights and ownership and such. But there are creative ones who can even outrank the actual line producer. George Lucas was primarily credited as an EP on all of the Star Wars films he worked on prior to the Disney sale (Kurtz, Kazanjian and McCallum all answered to him, and dealt primarily with the logistic demands of production, offering limited creative input). Same with Harve Bennett, who was credited as an EP on Wrath of Khan before becoming the solo producer on the following Trek films (and Nimoy on ST6, as well).
@17/Eduardo: Thanks for the info on Arad.
“But being an executive producer on a feature film is more fluid than the name implies. There are those like Uslan who are named because of rights and ownership and such. But there are creative ones who can even outrank the actual line producer.”
That’s true in TV as well. That’s the problem with the EP title — it’s applied to anyone who gets a cut of the profits, whether it’s because they’re a showrunner, a creative executive, a supervising director, a person in charge of the production process, a business executive of the production company or studio, a financial partner or backer, a star with a really good agent, or just a rights holder with no direct involvement in the production. Which is why many productions these days have 20 or more EPs listed. I wish they’d subdivide it into different titles that were actually descriptive.
Since I think we need an even amount of comments…I’m going to suggest SPARKS (2013) for the rewatch, because like the forth coming SAMARITAN it was written by a screen writer THEN adapted into GN form before being made into a movie, and I figure krad can have some fun with that when reviewing the two movies.
EP: I’m definitely going to include Samaritan, and looking into it, I think Sparks is worth including as well. Ditto Vampirella and Barbarella, which will get reviewed together.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Thanks krad! With a lot of help, I’ve sort of been bombarding with possibilities lately! Hope I haven’t worn out my welcome!
Man, what a Morbid review! this must’ve really sucked for you to sit through!
Moebius in this movie looks like Johnny Depp trying and failing to channel Marilyn Manson