Morbius was released back in April. Making only about 170 milly at the box office in its initial run, Sony hasn’t yet confirmed on why they brought Morbius to 1,037 theatres this past weekend. I’ll go out on a limb here, I think it has to do with the fact that for the past few months, a lot of people have been sharing memes connected to this boring bad movie. Morbius is not a fun bad movie. It is made by committee and doesn’t land anything it tries to do. It doesn’t swing for the fences like a truly good bad movie. It’s Morbin’ time was a fun joke. And now somebody is going to waste their time or their money or both. Can’t jokes just be… jokes
Morbius became a meme because it’s such a mid-2000s middling superhero flick, except it came out in 2022. It doesn’t have the same interconnections of the MCU (or, honestly, the actor quality) despite it’s post-credits scene, it doesn’t have the same weird buddy comedy angle as the Venom films, and it doesn’t really feature anything memorable aside from Matt Smith dancing shirtless to “Have Sex.”
Which is what makes it perfect for memes. Taking a middling, frankly mediocre superhero film and making a ton of memes out of it, especially if that film did badly at the box office, is exactly what the internet does. Hell, it could be successful at the box office and the internet would make memes out of it (see: Raimi’s Spider-Man films, which became a fountain of memes).
But as soon as you acknowledge the memes? As soon as you try to capitalize on the memes without knowing how to make the film in any way better than it was? Then the meme is dead. The joke is over.
I can’t help but wonder if this Morbius meme ISHT is not actually studio driven. How expensive could it be to hire some up and coming viral marketing experts to try to promote the home release of a bomb? Chevkovs morb here: I don’t think so because 1) memes are incredibly hard to “force” and Sony’s marketing department are most definitely not the geniuses who managed to crack that code and 2) a huge part of the Morbius memes involved coming up with creative ways to pirate it via Twitch and Discord. Cashing in on a meme is impossible.
Me, I just want Sony to burn more money doing it. I want whatever process needs to take place so that the value of the IP they have falls just low enough that they’re finally willing to just give up and sell it back to Disney/Marvel for a large sum, rather than running that stuff into the ground and throwing hissy fits when Marvel does literally all the work to make the Spider-Man movies, and then Sony’s like “but we deserve more for all your hard work.”
What I find hilarious is the amount of people that will watch Morbius for the first time, only to find out method actor Jared Leto never actually says the line. Well, that’s until the overdub in. You’re welcome, Internet.