Morbius

In the grand, dizzying circus of the modern "superhero industrial complex," we’ve reached a point where studios are digging through the bargain bins of comic book history like frantic shoppers on Black Friday. Enter Morbius, a film that didn't just stumble into theaters; it tripped over its own cape, face-planted into a pile of internet memes, and somehow became a cultural landmark for all the wrong reasons. It’s a fascinating artifact of our current franchise-saturated era, representing that awkward moment when a studio tries to build a "universe" out of characters that most people only recognize from the back of a 1994 trading card.

I watched this on a Tuesday afternoon while my neighbor was aggressively power-washing their driveway, and the rhythmic thrum of the water against the pavement was honestly more rhythmic than the film’s first act. But there’s something perversely watchable about a movie this committed to its own gloom.

A Time Capsule from 2004

Despite being released in 2022, Morbius feels like a "lost" film from the early 2000s, sitting right next to Ben Affleck’s Daredevil or Jennifer Garner’s Elektra. It ignores the self-aware, quip-heavy formula of the Kevin Feige-led MCU, opting instead for a serious, "edgelord" tone that feels almost nostalgic. Jared Leto plays Dr. Michael Morbius, a man with a rare blood disease who injects himself with illegal bat DNA and—surprise!—turns into a "Living Vampire."

Leto, known for his extreme method acting, reportedly spent so much time on crutches to "stay in character" that he slowed down production, eventually leading the crew to strike a deal where he’d be pushed to the bathroom in a wheelchair. You can see that intensity on screen; he plays the role with a whisper-quiet, brooding sincerity. It’s a stark contrast to Matt Smith, who plays the villainous Milo. Smith (best known for Doctor Who) clearly understood exactly what kind of movie he was in. While Leto is trying to win an Oscar for "Best Bat-Man Representation," Smith is chewing the scenery so hard he’s practically eating the drywall. His shirtless dancing scene is a highlight of pure, unadulterated camp that the rest of the movie desperately needed more of.

Chaos in the Edit Suite

Director Daniel Espinosa (who gave us the tightly wound Life in 2017) struggles to find a consistent rhythm here. The action sequences are a digital blur of purple and black smoke—an artistic choice intended to represent Morbius’s "echolocation" and speed, but it often ends up looking like a lava lamp exploded inside a wind tunnel. When the action slows down, like the subway fight sequence, you can see some genuine craft in the stunt work, but it’s quickly swallowed back up by the CGI sludge.

The pacing feels like a victim of the pandemic-era release shifts and heavy studio interference. You can practically smell the deleted scenes. For instance, Tyrese Gibson’s character, Agent Simon Stroud, was heavily marketed as having a high-tech mechanical arm, but in the final cut, it’s barely a footnote. There’s a sense that the film was chopped and changed to fit into Sony’s "Spider-Man Universe" (SSU), leading to a post-credits scene with Michael Keaton’s Vulture (from Spider-Man: Homecoming) that makes zero narrative sense even if you’ve seen every Marvel movie twice.

The "Morbin’ Time" Phenomenon

What makes Morbius a true "Cult Classic" of the contemporary era isn't the film itself, but the internet's reaction to it. It became the first movie to be "memed" into a re-release. After it flopped, the internet invented the catchphrase "It’s Morbin’ Time!" (a line that never appears in the movie) and pretended it was the greatest cinematic achievement in history. Sony, remarkably misreading the room, thought the "Morb" memes were genuine interest and put the film back in 1,000 theaters, only for it to flop again.

It’s a hilarious case study in the disconnect between social media discourse and actual box office legs. We live in an era where "ironic enjoyment" can keep a film alive long after it should have faded into the digital background of a streaming service. There is a weird, clunky charm to its failure. It isn't a "so bad it's good" masterpiece like The Room, but it is a fascinatingly mediocre relic of a time when every C-list villain was promised their own trilogy.

Ultimately, Morbius is a victim of its own franchise ambitions. It spends so much time trying to be a "Legend" that it forgets to be a coherent movie. The practical sets and the chemistry between Adria Arjona and Leto are decent, and Matt Smith is a delight, but the script by Burk Sharpless and Matt Sazama feels like it was generated by an AI that was fed nothing but 1990s vampire novels. It’s worth a watch if you want to understand the memes, or if you just really miss the era of superhero movies where everyone wore too much leather and no one cracked a joke. Just don’t expect it to change your life—unless you’re looking for a new way to describe your mid-afternoon slump. It's Morbin' time, I guess.