Days into 2022 and the year is already off to a horrible start. Morbius, the Spider-Man spinoff starring Jared Leto, has been delayed yet again from its very near January 28 premiere to the cruel and unusual date of April 1.
Besides feeling like a prank, the new April 1 premiere is another 3-month wait for a film that has been delayed five times (it was originally scheduled for July 10, 2020). The fact that Morbius will have been ready and waiting for us, the movie-watching public, to see it for nearly two years by the time it is finally released — if it is in fact released — is almost too much to bear.
As maybe the 189th biggest fan of Morbius the Living Vampire and the 189th least biggest fan of thespian and 30 Seconds to Mars (do the math; they did) frontman Jared Leto, Morbius represents the confluence of my cinematic yin and yang. All of my positive and negative energies are focused onto a single Spider-Man spinoff with potentially weird connections to the budding Spider-Man movie-verse. I don’t particularly care for these connections. I would like to see them, sure, but I am primarily interested in how the film will portray the paradoxical plight of a “living” vampire through the performance of one of the least predictable stars in Hollywood. I am reasonably certain that, once I see this film, I will achieve something akin to enlightenment: a total peace with myself and others, a bliss so pure that I will finally delete my Twitter account and read In Search of Lost Time.
Morbius, like Venom before it, is an increasingly rare breed of film: a franchise blockbuster with potential leeway to embrace whatever oddball sensibility the filmmakers settle on. Does that mean it will have stuff as weird and great as Tom Hardy leaping into a lobster tank, like in Venom? Not really! But it might. It’s got Jared Leto! Did you see him in House of Gucci? He’s pretty much Waluigi in that movie! Sky’s the limit, baby.
Of course, Morbius could also be a mess. Unfortunately for all of us, the answer is just sitting there, on some Sony Pictures hard drive, and not in movie theaters or on streaming platforms, where it can be adored or, at the very least, affectionately memed. Or both!