It goes without saying that online popularity isn’t quite a guaranteed barometer of real-world success, but clearly those in charge at Sony were completely unaware of that fact when they hopped on the Morbin’ Time bandwagon to send Morbius back into theaters this past weekend.
While the Living Vampire’s solo blockbuster didn’t quite flop spectacularly first time around, a $163 million haul makes it one of the lower-grossing Marvel Comics adaptations to come along in a long while, even if it’s set to turn at least a little bit of a profit at the end of the day. Of course, the memes soon began flowing like wine, which gave the studio the completely wrong impression.
Hilariously, there were a lot of people genuinely worried that Morbius would make a real splash during its second coming, which would in theory embolden the top brass to place a sequel into development. Then again, a lot of Morbheads resigned themselves to the fact the shark had been well and truly jumped when Jared Leto embraced the craze, in what was a rare show of self-awareness.
However, the numbers don’t lie, and as you can see from the evidence below, the Morbius re-release has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster.
To be fair, Daniel Espinosa’s panned supernatural superhero movie has been available on VOD for a while, and that’s without mentioning the sheer volume of Twitch channels to have been streaming Morbius nonstop for no other reason than sh*ts and giggles.
It was always unlikely it would soar to the upper echelons of the box office charts, then, but it looks as though Morbin’ Time may have had the final nail hammered into its coffin.
