Filming on the second installment in the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters wrapped shooting back in June 2019, but there’s still almost an entire year to go until Morbius hits the big screen. The vampiric superhero blockbuster has been shuffled around the calendar with alarming regularity, and the jury is very much out on whether or not it can come anywhere close to replicating the unexpectedly huge success of Venom.
Jared Leto is a great actor in the right project, but a very divisive presence in the wrong one, and his last attempt at playing a pale-faced comic book character wasn’t particularly well-received. Director Daniel Espinosa, meanwhile, is a solid hand if hardly a spectacular one, while most of the alarm bells have been set off by the duo behind the script.
Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless have written Dracula Untold, The Last Witch Hunter, Gods of Egypt and the Power Rangers reboot, none of which scored much in the way of praise from either fans or critics, and all of them underwhelmed at the box office. However, Leto seems confident enough in Morbius‘ chances of making an impact, describing it as the perfect movie to entice audiences back into the theaters in what’s hopefully going to be the aftermath of the COVID-19 era.
“I think it’s going to be kind of like the perfect, hopefully on the end of COVID, post-COVID, film for people to enjoy, ‘Let’s just go to the theater, have some fun, and enjoy a big Hollywood movie’. Talk about a fun movie. I loved it. You go from being like this frail person whose at the end of his life to being this incredibly vibrant, healthy person. And then of course things start to change, and there’s a price to be paid.”
Morbius is currently on its fifth different release date as it is, and surely things will be approaching some kind of normality once more by January 2022, but the buzz surrounding the project has never exactly been strong. Hopefully film fans have been saving as much money as possible, though, because it’ll cost a fortune to check out the massive slate of delayed titles once they eventually start rolling out this summer.
