YMMV / Morbius (2022)

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• Alternative Character Interpretation: Does Milo really kill people because he relishes his newfound condition as a vampire and simply doesn't bother to fight his bloodlust? Or is it out of long-time feelings of anger and envy at the healthy? One of his quotes to Michael has him claiming he wants others to feel the same pain he felt for decades as a cripple, implying that his killing spree is some sort of revenge. If so, did he always have murder and vengeance in his mind or was it all brought out by Michael's cure?
• Angst? What Angst?: By the second post-credits scene, Adrian Toomes appears to be okay with being stuck in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, despite the fact that he has a family of his own, the well-being of whom was his entire motivation for turning to villainy in the first place, back in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that he could possibly never see again, with his only thought being that he hopes the food is better in this universe.
• Ass Pull: Pretty much everything involving the post-credit scenes:
  • The first post-credits scene has Adrian Toomes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe being transported to Sony's Spider-Man Universe. The film shows the same purple splintering seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home and implies he got transported after everyone's memories were erased of MCU Peter Parker, except that's not how the spell works. The spell was meant to return people from outside the MCU back to their home universes, not the inverse, only his memories of Peter Parker should've been erased.
  • The second post-credits scene is arguably an even worse case, as not only does Toomes assume, with zero evidence, that Spider-Man is responsible for what happened to him, but he recruits Morbius, whom he reads about in a newspaper, for... something vague about "doing some good". And even though Toomes doesn't remember his Peter Parker anymore due to Strange's spell, he still remembers Spider-Man, who actively saved his life in Spider-Man: Homecoming, making his sudden suspicions towards him even more baffling. Not only that, but he somehow has his high-tech Vulture suit again, despite not having the resources (or know-how, considering he doesn’t have his gang) to remake it, as it was established in Homecoming that the suit was made from reverse engineered Chitauri technology picked up from the final battle of The Avengers (2012), the events of which never took place in the SSU.
• Awesome Music: See here.
• Bile Fascination: The film infamously received a massive ironic fanbase, despite just being a forgettably bad movie rather than So Bad, It's Good, because the fact it was critical and commercial flop and "Morbius" being an Inherently Funny Word, allowing for many sarcastic memes about how it was actually a cinematic masterpiece and secretly the most acclaimed and financially successful movie of all time. This in turn led to mass-online pirating as a joke, including 24/7 livestreams of it on Twitch, leading to people collectively hate-watching the movie just to be part of the experience.
• Critical Backlash: The movie was instantly lambasted by reviewers and fans of the comics, with such a bad reputation it led to ironic memes exalting the movie while never having actually seen it. But some viewers who did watch the movie for real out of curiosity instead of Bile Fascination found Morbius a fun vampire action flick if nothing else, that in spite of The Stinger being terrible and downright nonsensical, has plenty to offer and doesn't deserve the amount of hate it gets.
• Critical Dissonance: All-around hated by reviewers. Yet there are forgiving viewers, as shown by how the Rotten Tomatoes score is 16% for critics and 71% for audiences. The IMDb score is also a middling 5.1 with most votes in the 5-7 range, the Metacritic audience score average is a decent 6.7, and the CinemaScore for the film is a tepid C+. However, given a major meme surrounding the film, it's entirely likely many of those audience ratings were done ironically.
• Cry for the Devil: Milo is clearly past redemption by the end, but his death is actually quite sympathetic. Despite his monstrous acts, he genuinely wanted to help Michael in his own twisted way, and he's absolutely shocked and heartbroken to realize that his brother would actually kill him.
• Designated Villain: The mercenaries that Morbius kills after getting his powers. The film tries to paint them as Asshole Victims who probably had it coming, yet they never showed any signs that they were anything bad. They spent most of their time hanging out and minding their own business until Morbius starts going crazy. One of the mercs even stays behind and tells the others to run while he tries to hold off Morbius. Sure, the leader of the group comes across as a jerkass, but doesn't do anything to warrant death.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • The presence of several MCU references in the first trailer have caused a lot of speculation over its possible connection to it. The brief shot of a Spider-Man mural has "Murderer" written over it (referencing Far From Home), and Michael Keaton's character looks identical to his take on Adrian Toomes from Homecoming, down to the prison uniform. Ultimately, Sony had to confirm in 2021 that there was no actual connection to the MCU after some contradictory statements from Tyrese Gibson. At least until Venom: Let There Be Carnage showed Eddie Brock and Venom somehow being transported to the MCU, which implies Lying Creator was at work to prevent spoilers. And then this film returned the favor by showing that Toomes is somehow stranded in the SSU after Doctor Strange erased all memory of Peter Parker and returned everyone from the other Spider-Man films to their universes.
  • To a lesser extent, the briefly seen graffiti of Spider-Man is drawn after the version from the Raimi Trilogy, which has caused some speculation over whether it's related to that universe.^note Which is unlikely, since that universe already has its own Eddie Brock. Ironically enough, prior to his departure, Sam Raimi had expressed his interest in bringing Morbius into his film series, being that he's one of his favorite characters and villains from the comics.
  • After the film was pushed back to April not long after the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, there were rumors that they were filming new scenes with Andrew Garfield to place the SSU in the same universe as The Amazing Spider-Man Series. However, with this film taking place in the same universe as Venom (2018), it would not be possible as each franchise has its own distinct version of Ravencroft Institute.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: MCU fans prefer to think that the Adrian Toomes / Vulture from another universe is a variant and not the one from the MCU despite the confirmation from the director that it's the same character, given how his character arc was resolved in Spider-Man: Homecoming and how his appearance here undermines it, not to mention how the logic behind his appearance in this universe doesn't gel with how No Way Home presented the spell.
• Fanon: After the release of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, many fans began to Fan Wank the infamous Vulture plotholes as him having been sent to the SSU not by Doctor Strange like the movie tries to suggest, but as a multiversal anomaly caused by the Kingpin's supercollider like Renaissance Vulture. Helping this theory is that the film also features a character from Spider-Man: Homecoming, Donald Glover's Aaron Davis, as one of the displaced anomalies.
• Fan-Preferred Cut Content: Most fans would've preferred Toomes' original role, namely being a different variant as opposed to being teleported from the MCU as an attempt to tie it in with Spider-Man: No Way Home since the movie was originally meant to be released years earlier before Covid hit the scene.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: Most of the people memeing on this movie haven't seen it and don't intend to. Indeed, the movie having such a large segment of its fanbase that has never watched it is part of the meme, as they attribute lines to it that are so silly as to be obviously fake even if you never watched it — but since you haven't watched it, you can't be quite sure. This notably backfired on Sony when they attempted to rerelease the film to cash in on the memes even after it had already been a Box Office Bomb, only for them to lose even more money because they failed to realize that the memes were not in fact indicative of legitimate interest in the film.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • Many of the film's criticisms present here, namely a weak story, a sluggish pace, and an Ass Pull involving the Marvel Cinematic Universe were also levied against Venom (2018) and (in the case of the latter criticism) Venom: Let There Be Carnage. But unlike Morbius, whose only major appearance in mainstream media is Spider-Man: The Animated Series and little else, Venom has appeared in nearly every Spider-Man franchise across all forms of media to date. Plus, his disconnection to Spidey aside, the SSU Venom is considered a far more faithful take on the character compared to the version seen in Spider-Man 3, which helped his movies perform as strong as they did in spite of their flaws, but Morbius having little mainstream presence to judge from instead brought on a lot of ironic mockery.
  • Likewise, the aforementioned Ass Pull involving the MCU. In Let There Be Carnage, Spider-Man: No Way Home did explain why Venom wound up on Earth-199999, and left major implications for future Spider-Man stories by leaving behind a piece of himself. While Morbius tried to do the same thing, it fell flat in fans faces because Vulture showing up in the SSU reality contradicted what No Way Home established (Dr. Strange's spell was supposed to wipe everyone's memories of Peter Parker and send the universe-displaced villains home, not send existing MCU characters to other Earths). Plus, while Eddie and Venom were weirded out about the whole thing and tried to figure out what was happening, Toomes seems oddly fine with having been shifted across dimensions, making his presence a lot harder to swallow.
• Funny Moments:
  • Milo doing a shirtless dance scene in front of the mirror, in an American Psycho-like fashion, is probably one of the only gags in the movie that land as well as intended, which is further helped by the music choice.
  • Morbius pretending to be Venom to frighten a drug dealer is also surprisingly funny. Especially how he changes back to normal from his vampire-mode and cheerfully says, "I'm just kidding. Dr. Michael Morbius, at your service!"
• Ham and Cheese: The only consistently praised element has been Matt Smith's performance, as he brings a lot of energy and loudness to his role as the Big Bad.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Vulture somehow being transported over to the SSU from the MCU becomes a lot more worrying come Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which revealed that people being outside of their home universe risks an Incursion that'll destroy one or more of the realities involved. And unlike Spider-Man: No Way Home, which itself has become more worrying in hindsight, Toomes seems to be stuck there with no way off.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • All the "Morbius sweep" memes take on another layer of irony thanks to Morbius's return to theaters on June 3rd, 2022, itself prompted by the gaggle of Morbius memes, resulting in it raking in a whopping $300,000 that weekend^note For reference, the movie made less money that weekend than Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, a movie that had been out for almost two months, was playing in 30% fewer theaters and was already streaming on HBO Max. Ouch.
  • Becomes doubly hilarious when the film finally launched on Netflix where the months of memes finally did allow it to become the top film on the platform and stay in the top 10 for some time. Morbius finally got his sweep, but perhaps too late for it to matter.
  • Morbius finally did end up legitimately sweeping something... the Golden Raspberry Awards, where the movie received nominations in almost every category.
• The Inverse Law of Fandom Levity: Critical and commercial flop aside, the movie is supposed to be a dark and gritty tale about a vampiric Anti-Hero, that is forced to fight against his own Horror Hunger and childhood's best friend, with a lot of tragedy and drama going on. In spite of that, the movie ended up gaining an ironic fandom best know for making extremely goofy memes like "It's Morbin' Time", "Morbillion dollars" and "Have Sex".
• Jerkass Woobie: Not only does Milo have no regrets over all his killing and feasting, he actually enjoys it. But however inexcusable his actions are, he wound up that way because he spent his whole life handicapped and slowly dying in agony, so he understandably jumped at the chance to take a cure.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • Michael Keaton having a cameo as the Vulture as shown in the trailers piqued interest on whether or not the movie has a connection to the MCU. While it is the MCU Vulture, the actual context of his appearance was met with a near-universal negative reception.
  • Doctor Who fans also tuned in to see Matt Smith as Milo, the Big Bad of the movie.
• Love to Hate: Though the circumstances of his turn to villainy have been criticized, many agree that Milo is the most enjoyable part of the movie due to Matt Smith delivering an engaging and fun turn as the Big Bad.
• Magnificent Bastard: Dr. Michael Morbius himself is a doctor afflicted with a rare blood disease. Rising through the ranks of his field due to his brilliance, Morbius learns to splice Vampire Bat DNA with human DNA to cure himself. Curing his illness but afflicting himself with a deadly thirst for blood, Morbius terrorizes and rips apart a ship full of mercenaries before covering up the evidence and trying to evade law enforcement as he works on a cure. Upon discovering his similarly ill "brother" Milo had taken the cure, Morbius escapes prison and hunts him, constantly improvising and strategizing yet leaving him to his devices and retreating. Morbius uses his scientific genius to create an antibody that instantly kills vampires like himself, and masters his powers. Ruthlessly breaking a counterfeiter's fingers in his mission, Morbius ultimately confronts Milo and cleverly overwhelms him with a swarm of bats and injecting him with the antibody, killing him. Ultimately, Morbius defeats Milo thanks to his quick thinking and proceeds to evade justice despite considering himself a threat to the public.
• Memetic Badass:
  • The movie itself is an ironic one, with "fans" using the hashtag #MorbiusSweep to pretend that Morbius is an unsurpassed masterpiece that's made trillions of dollars at the box office, as well as Broke the Rating Scale in the positive direction on review aggregator sites in a similar manner to Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing for video games, to the point of creating edited images giving over one hundred percent satisfaction and placing it overwhelmingly at the top of worldwide film grosses.
  • In turn, this ended up extending to the title character. Due to the memetic portrayal of the movie as an impossibly extreme success, Morbius has been hyped up as one of the most powerful protagonists ever. With his (fake) Catchphrase "IT'S MORBIN' TIME!", he is said to pose a threat to the strongest characters of their respective works, such as Scarlet Witch in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness or Gorr the God Butcher in Thor: Love and Thunder.
• Memetic Mutation: It's memin' time!
• Narm:
  • As painful as it is to see a young Milo literally kicked around by bullies, the bullies being so generic and lacking in any substance beyond being mean for its own sake, which leads to their total inability to stop letting out stupid sounding laughter even as they commit violence, and can make the moment come off as unintentionally hilarious.
  • During the fight in the subway, there's a bit where the camera keeps cutting to Milo as he sprints in slow motion towards Morbius, making increasingly ridiculous screaming faces as he does so.
  • The extremely cartoony Iris Out scene transition early on in the film look more like something out of a Looney Tunes short than a Hollywood blockbuster.^note While another 2022 superhero movie, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, also included an unironic Iris Out transition, it was mostly tolerated in that movie due to that film already having a pretty campy and over-the-top tone all throughout, most likely due to director Sam Raimi. Seeing how this film has a much more serious and more subdued tone though, having a cartoonish Iris Out transition here feels completely out of place.
  • The Vulture's line "Not sure how I got here. Has to do with Spider-Man, I think". It was clearly meant to be some sort of "holy crap!" moment of fanservice for the audience, but the whole scene, and especially this line, are so nonsensically shoehorned in that it's cringeworthy, rivalling "Somehow, Palpatine returned" or "This is Katana. She's got my back." in terms of sheer laziness.
  • The painfully generic opening and closing credit sequences, looking like something out of a cheap video program, or something you could rip off of YouTube, and can be quite laughable, especially with the unfittingly intense music.
  • Morbius referencing Venom by name comes across as a painfully forced Continuity Nod that doesn't even make sense in context; he's threatening a thug to give up his lab, and the name "Venom" is not widely known in-universe, so it comes off as jarring.
• Narm Charm: Milo dancing and pulling a vampire face might be a ridiculous scene on its own, but it stands out among the rest of the film as being genuinely humorous and entertaining, not to mention surprisingly effective at showing how much Milo enjoys having full control of his body after a lifetime of physical disability.
• Periphery Demographic: Like most Marvel movies (MCU or otherwise), Morbius was made for general audiences with a slight focus on teenagers/young adults. It did miserably with them in terms of unironic reviews and word of mouth (although it did turn a profit), but instead garnered a huge Memetic Mutation ironic following on the Internet that persisted months after its release and keeps churning out new memes. Worth noting is that some of these fans didn't even bother to see the actual film.
• Signature Scene:
  • Milo's mirror dance is quickly becoming this among Morbius Twitch communities, with commenters enthusiastically calling out the timestamp and getting excited whenever it's about to come up. It helps that it's one of the few deliberately humorous parts of the film.
  • Adrian Toomes's cameo in the stinger is also becoming one of these, though more for how jarring and nonsensical it is.
• So Bad, It's Good: The narmy post-credit scene featuring Adrian Toomes teaming up with Morbius is so riddled with nonsensical dialogue and awkward delivery from both Leto and Keaton, that viewers can't help but laugh at how terrible the entire scene was directed. The rest of the movie, however, despite what the memes would have you believe, is just a regular, boring kind of bad.
• Song Association: "EKSE" by Off the Meds was obscure until it was featured in this film. It's impossible to find any mentions of the song that don't also mention Morbius.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The Spider-Man graffiti in the trailer is blatantly a screenshot lifted directly from Spider-Man (PS4).
  • The appearance of the Vulture in costume is marred by the fact that Keaton never physically appears, not to mention he and Leto never share the screen, making the sequence feel like it was stitched together via ADR and shots completed separately.
  • Michael's vampire face is seen as shoddy CGI. Similarly, Milo's CGI vampire face looks consistently low-grade and shoddy, almost like something out of a PlayStation 3 game.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The bullies tormenting and physically assaulting Milo as a child when he tries to get back Michael's letter that fell of the window is very painful to watch.
  • Milo's drawn-out stalking and murder of the poor nurse, and her clear fear are awful to watch as well.
  • Milo's murder of Dr. Nicholas, the man who has done nothing but care for him and attempts to dissuade him from going down a dark path.
  • Milo's death is surprisingly sad especially the heartbroken way he reacts to Michael, his own brother, killing him.
    Milo: Michael, you can't kill me! It's me, you can't kill me... You gave me my name, remember?
    Michael: I remember everything.
    Milo: I'm sorry...
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character
  • Despite appearing in all the advertising, Adrian Toomes's role amounts to extremely brief appearances in two mid-credits scenes that not only don't make any sense nor have any relation to the plot, but seemingly go against his portrayal in his last appearance and ruin the potential setup of The Stinger in Homecoming.
  • Dr. Emil Nicholas comes off as a waste of Jared Harris' talents. Despite being portrayed as a father figure and mentor to both Michael and Milo, we only see a bit of him interacting with them in the prologue, and he only has two scenes opposite both of them in the present. He at least gets an extended and emotional interaction with Milo, but after we've barely seen their relationship before that (even though they've been together for 25 years), his surrogate son killing him isn't nearly the tearjerker it was clearly intended as. Even worse is that he has probably only around a minute of screentime opposite Michael, with us only seeing an extremely brief meeting of them before Michael watched him die later, which makes his mourning ring emotionally hollow. Making matters worse is that this total lack of showing us their relationship makes Milo's jealousy of it feel completely irrational. And even worse, the trailers showed that the two had at least one more scene together that could have slightly amended this, but it was cut.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Milo's Face–Heel Turn has been criticized as coming out of nowhere. This is despite the pieces of a more fluid evolution being right there, given his prior bullying and brief line expressing vindictiveness towards the healthy. If the character's jealousy of the non-handicapped had been expanded on, then it could've been understandable how he's all too happy to kill and terrorize them, or at least see that his new condition has caused his negative feelings to spiral out of control. Instead however, Milo comes off as a Nice Guy who — after the easy to understand decision of prolonging his life — just seems to murder for fun.
  • Pre-reshoots and in the marketing, it was indicated that Adrian Toomes / Vulture would have had an actual role in the main story of the film. Instead, the character only appears in the post-credits scene in a manner that has nothing to do with the main story and serves as a shameless Sequel Hook.
  • Despite being set in the same universe, there are little to no references to Venom outside of one throw away line. Considering that Eddie Brock and Venom are central characters to this universe, it's odd that it's mostly glanced around. It also would have made more sense if Morbius met up with Eddie Brock instead of Adrian Toomes since both men are now fugitives.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Jared Leto does his best to sell Morbius's struggles with his emerging dark side, and those parts could fit any drama about a disease rather than a comic book movie about vampires.
  • This trope can also be said for Matt Smith, whose Evil Is Hammy performance was the most consistently praised aspect of this movie. Smith also wisely tones it down in a few spots for a more sincere turn in the film's quieter moments.
• Unexpected Character: One of the trailers revealing Michael Keaton doing a Role Reprise as the Vulture in a cameo caught a lot of people off-guard, especially considering that Sony initially advertised their universe as being unconnected to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.^note Though after the events of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, it’s clear that those rules no longer apply.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Given the horrific and dangerous side effects, you can't fault Michael for not curing Milo. And since he just had a serious episode and was on the verge of another, his abrupt dismissal of Milo is easy to defend, since he was just looking out for his safety. Except he then quickly calms down enough that he can call out to Milo before he's exited the room, and despite his superhuman speed, decides not to catch up to his slow-moving, paralyzed friend and explain things more calmly and clearly. Even if he was worried about his hunger resurfacing in that moment, we still see no attempt on his part to call or seek out and elucidate the matter to Milo afterwards.
• Watch It for the Meme:
  • Many people end up watching this movie just to see the alleged "It's Morbin' time!" line^note only to find there is no such line., while others watch to see the context behind Matt Smith as Milo dancing to the song that has the phrase "Have sex!" and sounds like they're singing "Poop my pants".
  • Sony hoped to capitalize on this by reissuing the film in early June 2022 in over a thousand theaters after the "Morbin' time" meme took off, seemingly unaware that all the attention the film had received was ironic mocking rather than any actual interest in the film. The reissue pulled in only $85,000, averaging $82 (around ten tickets) per theater.

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