I’m sure there are valid opinions on the “definitive” sinister six stories from the comics but it’s served me well to just assume it’s a fairly fluid concept they can apply to whatever group of villains they want, in whatever context they want. There’s not much a movie could retell that the comics haven’t already rehashed for themselves countless times over the years.
WOW, that looks amazing.
Maybe it’s just that I don’t have any recollection of ever reading a story with this guy in it, but I find it hard to see the draw here. Or why I should sit through yet another origin story (all of which are functionally pretty much identical).
At least with Shang Chi (which I similarly have zero reading connection to), there’s the draw of him being part of the MCU, with its attendant tie-ins. Not really sure what the draw of this guys is supposed to be, for those don’t know him from any other B-list hero/villains.
I guess superhero/ villain vampire is supposed to be the draw?
If I wanted that (which I don’t… really), I’ll go watch Blade who is connected to the MCU and is black, i.e., not yet another genius white man turned superhero. To be fair, Marvel has diversified heavily in the last decade or so - but that’s also why I really don’t find much interesting in Sony’s attempts to re-run the old, tired stories of heroes/villains from the 70-80s.
Don’t misunderstand me - would be nice if this was good. I’m just struggling to see anything that would draw me into a cinema to see this from the trailer, given that it seems like a bog-standard origin story.
Bingo. Just because it’s the first movie for Morbius, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be an “origin story” with all the negative connotations that implies.
It could be a fun story about a guy who turns into a sort of “sciencey vampire”, and he wasn’t before, and turning into one is the story. That could work.
For a well known character (whether from other movies or different media), it can be tiresome to see the story of how they became who they are repeated. You could have an amazing vision for how Peter Parker becomes a crime-fighter, but it will naturally have to work to overcome the audiences’s weariness of hearing that story again. I’d be right there with you rolling my eyes about another Spider-Man origin story. For someone less well known, I’m more open to it.
Now it could turn out to still feel like a bad movie whose only purpose was to provide essentially feature-length exposition for how a character became the person they are in service of telling a different story they’re only doing the ground work for here. We could still look back on Morbius and say “Ugh, it was another origin story to prop up an attempt at another IP Avengers-style-also-ran.”
But just telling the literal origin of a character audiences aren’t familiar shouldn’t be automatically dismissed, in my book.
When you watched the first Blade, were you annoyed that it was an origin story?
Nope. Firstly, because it was 23 years ago. And secondly because, even back then, they knew better than to waste more than a couple of minutes on an origin story that everyone knows to exhaustion: vampire bite makes vampire → cue Blade massacring vampires.
So everyone knew why Blade had some vampiric abilities but was a “daywalker”?
Having seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, it is no clearer where Morbius is supposed to fit into anything.
Spoilers for NWH.
The Morbius trailers so far have included Michael Keaton (maybe not officially confirmed anywhere to be Vulture?), which certainly suggests ties to the MCU/Holland Spider-Man world. But it also includes a shot of the Oscorp building, which NWH suggests doesn’t exist in the MCU, and a reference to Venom, which NWH teases but then yanks back out of the MCU at the end of the film before Tom Hardy can do anything more than get drunk with Dani Rojas. By all indications, everyone pulled into the MCU from previous iterations of the Spider-Man franchise has been sent back to where they came from by the end of the film. So where does that leave Morbius? He’s probably not in a world with “our” Tom Hardy Venom because there’s also the Spider-Man poster in the alley, and the Venom-verse doesn’t have a Spider-Man. He’s probably not in the prime MCU with Holland Spidey (despite the appearance of Keaton) because that has no Venom or Oscorp.
So maybe he’s just in some totally separate universe, and they never explain it, and who cares? Maybe the trailers are a misdirect as part of the secrecy around NWH marketing, and some or all of these little Easter eggs like the Venom line and Oscorp building never show up in the film. Hey, maybe he’s in the Amazing Spider-Man universe, Andrew Garfield is back again, and that universe just has its own Keaton Vulture, and Venom!
I really have no idea, it’s sort of fun to speculate, but I certainly don’t understand any more than I did before I saw NWH.
If Peter can exist in other multiverses (not a spoiler - there are many different Spider-man variants), so can Michael Keaton’s character. This could be the Morbious/Venom universe version of Toomes.
Also, Hardy maybe didn’t get to play in the MCU sandbox for long, but based on the bit of symbiot left on the bar we may be seeing more Venom yet!
Look, Crisis on Infinite Earths was basically a trainwreck and every meta thing since has basically been a trainwreck. It is what it is.
The reviews are not good. That’s for sure.
Awww, I thought the trailer looked so cool.
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I don’t watch trailers, but I really love this concept of a vampire working for a big Japanese corporation. Will he show the same kind of dedication as an office employee that a regular worker would? Oh, and he’s damaged! And he’s played by Jared Leto!
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Hashtag-damaged, yo.
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Jared Leto is not good