Morbius, Sony Pictures’ next Spider-Man-less Spider-Man spinoff film, is finally set to make its way to theaters after years of delays. While the production endured hardships that were hardly unique to the film and television world during the pandemic era, this movie remains one of the most prominent victims of costly date shuffles; a notion exemplified by the fact that it was originally slated to arrive way back in July 2020. Now, with the release of a final trailer, the embattled movie’s circuitous path to its theatrical goal is within reach.
Jared Leto’s starring role as Dr. Michael Morbius was already well-established by the years’ worth of trailers we’ve been watching for Morbius, and the newest clip, labeled as the “Final Trailer” won’t exactly change any perspectives on the picture. Indeed, we only see slightly more of Leto’s performance as the classic Marvel Comics character, a scientist whose attempt to cure his own rare blood disease ends up turning him into a fanged, hemoglobin-craving creature, or, as famously labeled, a “Living Vampire.” However, the clip does carry a theme hinting of the character’s ongoing conflict between using his empowering curse for good or embracing the benefits of his so-called “gift” in a destructive, wantonly selfish manner as a villain.
Check out the final Morbius trailer just below.
As you can see, the new clip increases the intensity and further signals Morbius’s nebulous connectivity to the Spider-Man films, even hinting at an apparent sinister mentor dynamic from Michael Keaton’s role-reprisal as Spider-Man: Homecoming villain Adrian Toomes/The Vulture. Moreover, we are also shown new glimpses of this film’s main villain, Loxias Crown (Matt Smith), who, suffering from the same rare blood disease as Morbius, and apparently exposed to his own version of the experimental cure, has clearly chosen the primrose path that Toomes’s advice-doling convict conveyed to our title character. Indeed, the trailer’s hero/villain dichotomy aptly mirrors Morbius’s classic comic book arc, which started back as a vampiric villain in The Amazing Spider-Man #101 (1971), which would eventually lead the character to solo-series-starring antihero splendor, and even occasional membership in the Avengers.
Morbius was directed by Swedish helmer Daniel Espinosa, who worked off a screenplay by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. The director first broke big in the States with the 2012 crime drama Safe House, which starred Denzel Washington and future Deadpool star Ryan Reynolds, who would also co-star alongside Spider-Man: Far from Home’s Jake Gyllenhaal in the director’s 2017 sci-fi effort, Life. As if those coincidences were not enough, he also directed another Spider-Man spinoff star, Venom’s Tom Hardy, in the 2015 Stalinist Russia-era drama Child 44. Thus, notwithstanding the unexplained continuity connections, this film is a product of the Sony/Marvel Spider-Man family.
Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see if two years of frequent delays end up clipping Morbius‘s proverbial wings. After all, it was meant to precede the spectacle of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which, of course, ended up arriving well before it, reaping unprecedented box office riches in the pandemic era, standing with a worldwide gross of over $1.8 billion at press time. Thus, the film originally meant to be a continuity-tangential aperitif for the No Way Home main event is now in the untenable position of having to follow the biggest cinematic act of the last three years.
Morbius will, at long last, face the theatrical music with an actual release, which is set to occur on April 1—and that’s no trick.
