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You may have heard about Morbius: The Living Vampire. He’s a bit-part Spider-man character that was, confusingly, given an entire feature-length movie, played by Jared Leto. Even more confusingly, the film’s tagline is “a new marvel legend arrives.”
To be clear, I have been reading comics since I was 9. I have a huge collection of original comic artwork, I’ve met numerous famous comics people, and I have kept up with at least every major Marvel event since the early 2000s. Morbius is a character that I barely remember from the 90’s Spider-man cartoon, and that’s only because I recently watched it with my son.
Morbius himself is, as you’d guess, a living vampire. What this really means is that he’s a vampire that can walk around during the daytime, probably because that’s the single most annoying part of writing a vampire character.
In any case, Morbius, the movie based on a no-name character, was given a 75-million-ish budget and a star — Jared Leto — along with the single most confusing marketing campaign in the world. The trailer (and yes, I extend this to the other trailers) is one of the biggest marketing blunders I’ve ever seen, because it tells you nothing about the movie other than that Jared Leto is a spooky dracula that can fly, and that at some point somebody, probably Michael Morbius, murders a bunch of people on a boat.
Dear reader, I am going to tell you something shocking: Morbius isn’t a bad movie, and has several pretty great bits. I will endeavor not to spoil them, but…
