Trailer
Plot summary
At a hospital in Greece, young Michael Morbius meets Lucien, the boy he renames Milo, and the two bond over the rare blood disease they both carry. Their adoptive father, hospital director Emil Nicholas, sees Michael's promise and sends him to medical school in New York. Twenty-five years on, Michael declines a Nobel Prize for his work on artificial blood, and his colleague Martine Bancroft learns he has secretly collected vampire bats from Costa Rica to splice their genes with his own. Milo pays for a vessel in international waters, fitted with Michael's equipment, where the experiment is meant to run. The cure works, and Michael is left a vampire who needs blood.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Morbius (2022)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Morbius's negative reception spawned an ironic meme culture that jokingly heaped praise on the film, and the attention led Sony to put it back into 1,000 theaters on June 3, 2022. That re-release bombed as well, taking just $280,000 over its opening weekend.
- Among the Morbius memes was a fake quote claiming Martin Scorsese had reversed his view that superhero films are not cinema after seeing it. Tyrese Gibson, who plays FBI agent Simon Stroud, shared the quote on Instagram and deleted it, with journalists attributing the post to him believing it was genuine.
- Michael Morbius nearly appeared in Blade (1998), with director Stephen Norrington set to cameo as him ahead of a larger role in a sequel, but the character was cut from that film and left out of Blade II (2002) when Norrington declined to return.
- Michael Keaton's scenes as Adrian Toomes had to be reshot because the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) did not line up with Morbius. Keaton said he was hastily told why his character appears in the film, adding that "even they couldn't quite explain it."
- Tyrese Gibson noted that his FBI agent Simon Stroud is white in the comic books and that the producers "made him black" to cast him. Gibson also said a hi-tech weapons-grade arm for Stroud was cut from the film, and he signed a three-picture deal when he joined.
- Matt Smith had turned down other superhero film roles before joining Morbius as the villain Milo, signing on because of director Daniel Espinosa and encouragement from his former Doctor Who castmate Karen Gillan, who plays Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
- Morbius's second weekend in U.S. and Canadian theaters brought a 74% drop, the second-worst ever for a superhero movie behind only Steel (1997) and the worst of any tentpole superhero film, as it finished behind Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
- Morbius was pirated en masse, with many Twitch channels illegally streaming the whole film on repeat; one channel, Morbius247, was banned after gaining thousands of followers.
