The superhero genre is almost literally minting money for any studio with the resources to produce a movie. So when Morbius, the latest in Sony’s increasingly unpopular “Spider-Man Without Spider-Man Cinematic Universe,” flopped on its release last month, it became Hollywood’s latest game of hot potato of blame. Conor O’Sullivan, the monster makeup master who is credited with the look of the movie’s titular Living Vampire, as well as all the film’s creature designs, became the latest living embodiment of that Simpsons meme where Homer backs away slowly through a hedge.
O’Sullivan, who created the White Walkers for Game of Thrones, and scored an Oscar nomination for creating Joker’s makeup in The Dark Knight, was being interviewed by Inverse about his work in the forthcoming Finnish horror film Hatching when the question of Morbius came up. He explained that studio Sony Pictures threw out all of his work at the last minute:
I did Morbius, and I must have produced 500 or 600 designs. And at the end of all of that, they threw something on the table — literally the day before we started shooting — that was completely different from the path that we’d been on. So, it ended up digital because Sony wanted to do this completely different design. And now they’ve brought the film out, and it’s gone back to all my designs, which have all been done digitally!
But Sony wasn’t the only passenger thrown under the bus, as O’Sullivan tactfully added that he likes to work with a director who gives him, you know, direction. Seemingly, Morbius’ Daniel Espinosa did not:
We do like it when a director comes to the table with a full idea of exactly what they want. It’s nice to contribute designs, to be part of the process of developing them. It’s also nice to be told what to do.
Espinosa, meanwhile, has been trying to get the stink of The Living Vampire off of him, pitching more Spidey-Without-Spidey films, asking his friends to curate the reviews he reads, and explaining to the press why Tyrese Gibson’s character Agent Stroud, whose defining trait is his bionic arm, doesn’t have a bionic arm.
Tyrese, for his part, has been fantasizing that he’s in a different Marvel franchise, and another actor threw the entire editing crew under the bus before desperately pitching himself for a recurring MCU role.
Morbius, which has failed to score a sequel after breaking all the wrong box office records, will apparently drop on VOD on May 19th, a fact accidentally leaked by an Indian ticket-booking service.
