Massive 74% Drop For ‘Morbius’ Is A Warning To Sony

Way back in January of 2020, Sony dropped the first trailer for Morbius. At the time, I wrote that the artistic and commercial reception to their next “Spider-Man villain gets their own solo origin story” film would be a chance to show that Venom wasn’t a fluke and that there was audience interest in these kinda-sorta Marvel movies. Well, 1.5 years later, with a not-awful $39 million domestic debut but genuinely terrible C+ Cinemascore and record (for a big comic book flick) 74% second-weekend drop, the question remains. Is there hope or life in these “Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters” movies or did audiences just really enjoy Tom Hardy’s performance in Venom and then Venom: Let There Be Carnage?

That micro question is representative of Hollywood’s thinking over the last ten years. We are weeks away from the tenth anniversary of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, a film whose $1.5 billion global success sent Hollywood on a doomed path chasing cinematic universes and prioritizing superhero stories. Hollywood didn’t realize that audiences didn’t care about the abstract notion of the “cinematic universe,” they just loved The Avengers and liked the MCU. Audiences didn’t crave superhero stories, they just gravitated to characters existing within the MCU and DC brands. Hollywood’s reaction, attempting to retrofit existing IP into superhero stories (Solo, Tarzan) and interconnected universes (The Mummy, King Arthur) was part of what allowed streaming to supplant theatrical moviegoing in modern pop culture domination.

Back to Morbius, the film was as critically savaged as frankly was expected from the start. If there was any benefit of the doubt, it was because Venom was a clear “audiences dig it more than critics” smash ($214 million domestic, $269 million in China and $854 million worldwide). That Morbius ended up opening not just after Venom, Into the Spider-Verse and two MCU Spider-Man flicks but after those along with Let There Be Carnage and No Way Home also offered some, well, “false hope.” However, to use my favorite Matrix Reloaded quote (which will also apply to this month’s box office coverage of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore), what happened happened and couldn’t have happened any other way.

We knew two years ago that Jared Leto was not a butts-in-seats draw, and that he didn’t even have the whole “online folks think he’s a lot of fun” variable which benefited Tom Hardy. Hardy may not have been a butts-in-seats draw in films like The Drop or Child 44 (directed by eventual Morbius helmer Daniel Espinosa), but he was seen and well-liked in Mad Max: Fury Road, The Revenant and a handful of Chris Nolan biggies (Inception, Dunkirk and The Dark Knight Rises). That Hardy went full-camp while Leto played it super-straight was always going to be a key difference, just as was a simple fact that Venom is a well-known and popular Spider-Man villain while Morbius was not.

Venom was so damn popular that Sony would eventually force Sam Raimi to include the character in Spider-Man 3, even while the character’s “grimdark violence” 1990’s mentality clashed with Raimi’s preferred 1960s sensibilities. Morbius, the living vampire, is mostly known for getting his ass kicked by Blade and/or appearing in the 1990’s Spider-Man cartoon where he has holes on his hands and screams about needing plasma because the show wasn’t allowed to say “blood” or show him partaking in conventional vampire behavior. Especially in retrospect, that Venom is a smash while Morbius will be lucky to crack 2.5x its $75 million budget is akin to the success of Beauty and the Beast ($1.263 billion) not leading to similar success for Dumbo ($353 million).

Maybe if Morbius were a better, less “cut to ribbons” movie (Espinoza’s previous films are all A-B coherent), or at least offered as much shamelessly goofy dumb fun as did the first Venom, it might have held up this weekend. Sony’s triumph with Venom is in crafting a franchise with a specific appeal, a gonzo goofy Tom Hardy essentially flirting with himself amid campy violent comic book adventure, even for those who don’t care about the brand. It no longer needs Spider-Man as a carrot. The sale for Morbius was entirely rooted in the brand and/or that brand’s connection to the Spider-Man universe. What its failure now means, for better or worse, is that the films from this not-quite-MCU universe have to deliver on their own merits.

I have no idea what’s in store for Kraven the Hunter movie, which will open on January 13, 2023. J.C. Candor (A Most Violent Year, Triple Frontier, Margin Call, All Is Lost) has my benefit of the doubt, but Aaron Johnson is not remotely a butts-in-seats draw. Kraven is entirely known as a Spider-Man supervillain sans much of an identity outside of that role. Sure, Sony can tease him eventually kicking Peter Parker’s ass, but making audiences sit through an anti-hero origin story first seems like a recipe for “You’ll get what you wanted in the sequel!” disaster. Likewise, S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, has to deliver the “worth it even if I don’t care about the IP” goods.

The successes of Spider-Man: No Way Home ($1.88 billion without China), Ghostbusters: Afterlife ($197 million), Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($502 million again sans China) and Uncharted ($383 million) make the comparative Morbius miss more a momentary embarrassment than an existential crisis. If Kraven and Madame Web don’t click artistically and (especially) commercially, maybe Venom was less about “Audiences want to see Spider-Man villains in their own movies!” and more about “Hey, I want to see a Venom movie and this one looks fun!” Just because audiences flocked to Joker doesn’t mean they’ll show up for, I dunno, Scarecrow. Just like, once upon a time, audiences flocking to the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn’t mean they would race to theaters for the Dark Universe.