The story of Morbius and the Hollywood execs who just made a whopping 85k on the movies re-release

One special trait that boomers in Hollywood all have in common is their complete inability to understand internet culture, and its kind of fucking hilarious. Let’s recap the whole story as it stands: ‘Morbius’ was released on April 1st in the United States and is the 3rd film in the ‘SSU’, otherwise known as ‘Sony’s Spider-Man Universe’. You see, back in the 90s Marvel was about to go under and needed some cash, so they sold the film rights for Spider-Man to Sony for a reported $7 million bones. They also sold the film rights to a handful of some of their most successful characters like Hulk, Thor, and the Black Widow, but eventually those characters reverted to Marvel or were purchased back. Spider-Man’s film rights on the other hand are still owned by Sony. Sony has allowed Disney to use Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to a deal struck as recently as 2019, though the details of that deal were undisclosed.

Now, Sony doesn’t use the Spider-Man character at all in their movies as part of the deal with Disney (who now owns Marvel for those living under a rock), but what they have been doing is attempting to make movies using Spider-Man’s villains. When they bought Spider-Man’s film rights, they also got the rights to the various villains in the Spider-Man comic lore. One of those villains was our boy – Morbius, played by Jared Leto. Ever since the Marvel Cinematic Universe became the biggest sensation in theatres over the past decade, every other film studio in existence wants to capitalize on the idea of an ‘extended cinematic universe’. The problem is – pretty much everyone except Marvel SUCKS at executing the extended universe. Sony is no exception to this rule.

In another failed extended universe by DC, the 2016 Suicide Squad movie featured a certain actor as ‘The Joker’, a notoriously shit performance that just about everyone disliked. That actor is none other than Jared Leto! Somehow, everything this man does recently has whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is, turning it to shit. The first Suicide Squad bombed at the box office, currently sits at 5.9 on IMDB, and was also memed to death, in particular Jared Leto’s incredibly cringey performance as the Joker. This April, Morbius actually had a pretty solid opening weekend, topping the box office at $39 million. Then it fell of a goddamn cliff, earning only 10.2 million, the second worst drop in earnings for a superhero movie ever. 5 weeks later the movie would already be out of the box office. But oh this would not be the end of Morbin time, not yet.

The internet has been increasingly critical of every studio in Hollywood trying to develop their own extended universes instead of coming up with something new and original, and the legions of meme makers were licking their chops at an opportunity to pile the pain on Sony and Jared Leto for yet another bad performance. When the April 1st release hit, the reactions were instantly negative, with many critics professional and amateur once again pointing to Jared Leto just being unable to play a convincing villain. The floodgates were open, and by the time the movie had its historic slump in the second weekend, nothing could be done to stop what was coming. The next month saw a shitstorm of memes and jokes all across the internet from Reddit to Tik-Tok and everything in between. You’ve likely already seen a thousand so here are just a few:

Now, as I said, when Morbius was pulled from theatres it was not to be the end of Morbin time just yet. No, in fact the brilliant big-brained totally-deserving-of-their-jobs executives at Sony saw thousands of young whipper snappers on the interwebs making those wild things called “me-me’s” about their movie. To give them the tiniest bit of credit, they were correct in saying that Morbius had become somewhat of an international sensation. Of course, that’s because of how bad it was, but that didn’t stop them from approving a re-release in 1,000 theatres across the United States this past Friday, June 3rd. That’s right, a movie which couldn’t even gross $75 million in the United States and has historically bad ratings for a top-flight superhero movie, was given a re-release because of MEMES. The power of memes completely broke these people’s brains. To absolutely nobodies surprise, Morbius gained a world-shattering 85 thousand dollars on its Friday re-release, averaging just $85 per theatre.

When something like this happens, it makes me wonder how in the ever-living hell some of these people have jobs doing what they do. Random old shits who don’t have a creative bone in their body somehow making hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to make decisions that any random 16-year-old on the street could have told them was going to fail. Hire one single intern to tell them when they’re out of touch and they’d save themselves a world of embarrassment.

Despite their heroic efforts to capitalize on the internet making fun of them, Sony is going to have to accept that Morbin time will probably end in a few weeks when a new meme takes over the internet. Thanks for all the memes we got in the meantime though.