After hearing virtually nothing about Morbius since last summer, the news has started coming thick and fast about Sony’s latest entry in their Marvel universe. Despite the fact that Spider-Man will remain a part of Kevin Feige’s Marvel Cinematic Universe for the time being, Sony are still intent on establishing a comic book franchise of their own, with the box office success of Venom turning out to be a surprisingly lucrative launching pad for the studio.
While Sony are no longer in the business of making standalone Spider-Man movies, they still retain the rights to a lot of characters closely associated with the web-slinging superhero, and are putting them to good use thanks to the upcoming releases of Morbius and Venom 2, with solo outings for Kraven the Hunter, Black Cat, Silver Sable and Madame Web also reported to be in the works.
The first trailer for Morbius is expected to drop at some point in the next week, officially kicking off the marketing campaign in anticipation for a July release, but the first official look at star Jared Leto in character has already leaked online. Based on that image alone, the movie isn’t set to shy away from his comic book appearance, but those expecting a full-blown vampire epic set in the superhero genre may want to temper their expectations a little bit.
Sources close to We Got This Covered – the same ones who said Marvel is eyeing Daniel Radcliffe for Moon Knight and that Tom Holland is in talks to cameo in Venom 2, both of which have since been confirmed – have told us that Michael Morbius is set to remain in human form for the majority of his movie debut, which if true makes for disappointing news.
Our sources confirm that we’ll see a full-blown, comic-accurate transformation from respected biologist into nightmarish member of the undead, but it won’t happen until the final act of the film, possibly as late as the last 20 minutes. As such, it’ll be interesting to see if the first trailer reflects this information, or if it’ll play up the vampire aspect in order to generate buzz.
Either way, if this turns out to be the case, it would be an incredibly strange creative decision from Sony if they held off on showing the title character in all his glory for the vast majority of the running time and would likely upset a lot of fans, too. But we’ll find out for ourselves what exactly they’ve got planned when we get our first look at Morbius in the coming days.
