Sony shared a new trailer for Morbius yesterday, which gave us our best look yet at Jared Leto’s Living Vampire. It also promised a variety of connections and crossovers with everything from the Amazing Spider-Man movies to Venom. It still kept a lot under wraps, though, including the film’s main villain — Loxias Crown, as played by The Crown star Matt Smith. But why is the marketing deliberately avoiding Crown? Is it because he’s set to have some major ties to the MCU?
Also known as Hunger, Crown is another Living Vampire and a sworn enemy of Morbius. In the comics, though, he was originally an agent of HYDRA. Masquerading as a scientist in order to get hold of the experimental SHOC armor, which derived its power from Darkforce energy, Crown killed its creator William Fields and donned the armor himself, though it started to fatally poison him. Together with his genius lover Dr. Andrea Janson, Crown realized the key to saving his life rested with Morbius — who they imprisoned — and Fields’ son, Tod. But Tod was protected by Spider-Man.
Crown allied with the Maggia and HYDRA boss Baron von Strucker to best Spidey, but the Maggia betrayed him, killing Janson and stealing SHOC for their own purposes. Crown swore revenge and led an army of HYDRA soldiers against his enemies. On the verge of killing Spider-Man, Crown was defeated and drained of blood by an escaped Morbius, with the building they were in exploding due to the unstable SHOC armor. However, Crown survived. The mix of Darkforce and Morbius’ blood turned him into a living vampire himself.
Crown’s backstory is certainly going to be changed for the screen — the whole SHOC storyline is being replaced with Crown simply having the same blood disease as Morbius — but it’s vaguely possible that some HYDRA connections could remain, given the newfound closeness of Sony’s films to the MCU. We’ll find out when Morbius opens in theaters on January 28, 2022.
