‘Morbius’ Nabs $5.7 Million Thursday

In what Hollywood hopes is a good start to what will be a strong month at the box office, Sony’s Morbius earned $5.7 million in Thursday previews. The next chapter in the uh, Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters, stars Jared Leto as “the living vampire” who turns himself into a bloodsucker in an attempt to cure a lifelong blood disease.

The Daniel Espinosa-directed film was supposed to open two summers ago with the first trailer debuting in early January of 2020. The sheer unending run of Morbius trailers playing before almost every single theatrical motion picture since at least March of 2021 became its own (good-natured) running joke. Pour one out for never, ever having to see the trailer for Morbius ever again. The plasma burned out long before, but the (Marvel) legend never did.

Yes, the reviews were (expectedly) terrible with 15% rotten and 3.4/10 on Rotten Tomatoes. I’m on a family road trip, so I haven’t seen it yet, but the word seems to imply that the film is what we all expected/feared Venom would be in late 2018. However, Venom was “saved” by a go-for-broke Tom Hardy performance, a surprisingly farcical sense of humor and its oddly unassuming nature as a stand-alone “just a movie” flick even amid obvious cinematic universe designs.

Anyway, I’ll refrain from further commentary until I see the film, but its $75 million budget is another example of Sony’s recent run of “blockbusters on a budget” tentpoles that don’t require record-breaking grosses (or big bucks in China) to cross into profitability.

Running the math, a $5.7 million Thursday gross means that if Morbius plays like Venom: Let There Be Carnage ($90 million from an $11.6 million Thursday) then it’ll score $45 million for the weekend. Worst case scenario is that audiences don’t like it much more than critics and that it ends up with a Thursday-to-weekend figure on par with Black Widow ($80 million/$13.2 million) or Batman v Superman ($166 million/$28 million) and earns “just” $35 million over the Fri-Sun frame.

The “realistic” best-case scenario is a straight-up “normal for Marvel” 9% to 12% split, giving the film a debut between $48 million and $63 million. Splitting the difference gives Morbius around $55 million for the weekend. The film was almost certainly never going to open like Venom as Eddie Brock is more popular than Michael Morbius and Tom Hardy is more popular than Jared Leto. But since Sony spent 17% less on Morbius than on Venom, that’s okay.