Morbius (2022) Review: The Memes Are Better Than the Film

🕷️ Introduction

🕸️ This review is part of our Sony Marvel Universe Hub – every Sony Spider-Man, Venom and Marvel film ranked and explained.

There is a particular kind of bad film that is almost harder to write about than the genuinely terrible ones. The film that is not a disaster — there are no embarrassing performances, no production collapses, no moments so misguided they become accidentally iconic. It is just nothing. It passes through your cinema visit like a familiar but flavourless meal: technically food, correctly assembled, nourishing nobody. Morbius (2022) is that film. It is not the worst superhero film ever made. It is, more damningly, the most forgettable.

The cultural artefact that Morbius produced — the meme cycle — is considerably more entertaining than the film itself. “It’s Morbin’ Time.” The fake enthusiasm. The invented lore of a phantom Morbius extended universe where the living vampire is beloved and the sequel is inevitable. The brief, tragically real Sony re-release that earned approximately $85,000 on its opening day. The internet took a mediocre film and built something genuinely funny out of the wreckage, which says less about the film than it does about the creativity of collective online mockery.

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Morbius (Blu-ray) (opens in a new tab)

The complete Morbius experience. One watch is enough. At least it is short.

The honest review, though, is this: Morbius is a 5 out of 10. Watchable. Competent in isolated moments. Instantly forgettable. A film that demonstrates what happens when a studio manufacturing process attempts to build a franchise on a character who needed either a distinctive creative voice or a significantly better script, and received neither.

That 71% audience score deserves a note. The audience score for Morbius was significantly inflated by the meme community voting ironically and then reviewing the film as if they had experienced a masterpiece. Take the 71% with the same scepticism you should apply to anything the internet has decided to adopt as a shared joke. The 15% critics score is closer to the truth, though even that frames the film as worse than it is. It is not a disaster. It is a 5.

🧬 The Origin Formula, Applied Without Enthusiasm

The story of Morbius follows Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), a biochemist of extraordinary intellect who has spent his life suffering from a rare blood disease. His closest friend Milo (Matt Smith, doing considerably more with the role than Leto) shares the same condition. Morbius, decades into searching for a cure, synthesises a treatment from bat DNA that cures his disease but transforms him into what is effectively a living vampire: echolocation, superhuman speed and strength, the ability to fly, and an insatiable need for blood.

What follows is a textbook origin film: the discovery of powers, the attempt to resist their darker implications, the antagonist who makes different choices, the inevitable confrontation. There is nothing wrong with this structure. The MCU has used it many times. What the MCU understands, and Morbius does not, is that the formula requires a lead performance of exceptional charisma or a script with enough specificity to make the familiar beats feel personal.

Morbius has neither. Jared Leto is a legitimately capable actor — his work in Requiem for a Dream and Dallas Buyers Club demonstrates a genuine range. He is not equipped to save a character who is written as a collection of noble-scientist cliches with no distinguishing personality traits. Michael Morbius has a condition, a cure, a conscience, and a costume. He has no perspective, no wit, no quality that makes him feel like a specific human being rather than an origin-story template. Leto performs this template diligently and without evident joy.

🦇 Matt Smith: The Film’s Best and Most Wasted Asset

The single best element of Morbius is Matt Smith as Milo, and he is almost enough to justify the watch on his own. Smith has always been an actor who understands how to make stillness interesting — his seasons as the Doctor demonstrated a capacity for physical expressiveness and quiet menace that most action films never call upon. Morbius calls upon it in flashes, and in those flashes you can see the film the movie might have been.

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Morbius Marvel Legends Action Figure (opens in a new tab)

Better than the film. Actually. The figure has more personality than the movie version of the character.

Where Leto’s Morbius is earnest and controlled, Smith’s Milo is alive. When Milo undergoes his own transformation and decides that the ethical restraints Morbius clings to are simply not interesting to him, Smith inhabits that liberation with genuine energy. His movement changes. His face changes. He plays Milo as a man who has been told for decades that his condition is a tragedy and has finally decided it is actually a liberation. That is a richer character arc than the hero gets, and Smith delivers it well.

The problem is structural: Milo exists to be defeated by Morbius, and so the film systematically undermines its best character in service of a resolution that feels both inevitable and unearned. By the time the two face each other in the climax, the audience has more reason to root for Matt Smith’s villain than Jared Leto’s hero, which is not the intended outcome.

🎭 The Meme Phenomenon: When the Internet Writes the Better Review

It would be dishonest to write about Morbius in 2026 without addressing the elephant in the room, which is that the film is now most famous for things that happened after it left theatres. The “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme began as a parody of the film’s aspirational marketing — the idea that Morbius had a signature move, a catchphrase, a cultural moment equivalent to other superhero films’ iconic lines. He does not. The film gives him none.

The internet took that gap and filled it with elaborate fake lore. Morbius became, in the parallel universe of social media, a beloved cult classic. People claimed to have seen it multiple times. Reviews described it as a filmmaking masterpiece. Fan theories proliferated. Sony, in a move that remains one of the most puzzling decisions in recent studio history, interpreted this ironic enthusiasm as genuine demand and re-released the film theatrically in April 2022. It earned $85,000 on opening day. The people who had been shouting about “Morbin’ season” were very much not going to the cinema.

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Morbius (4K Ultra HD) (opens in a new tab)

4K will not rescue the script, but the bat-transformation visuals are at least impressive at full resolution.

The episode is actually a quite interesting case study in the gap between social media signal and real-world intent. It tells you something useful about how studios can misread online engagement in the streaming era. It does not tell you anything useful about the film, but it is far more entertaining than the film, which is the point.

🕸️ The SSU’s Structural Problem, Made Visible

Morbius reveals something that Venom obscures: the SSU is a franchise built on the assumption that audiences will follow Marvel-branded characters regardless of whether those characters have been given the material to be interesting. With Venom, Tom Hardy’s sheer force of personality papered over the structural gaps. With Morbius, there is no such paper.

The franchise exists, as noted in our Venom review, because Sony held the film rights to Spider-Man’s supporting cast after agreeing to share the central character with Marvel Studios. The original Sony Spider-Man films had Spidey front and centre. The SSU is Spidey-less not by design but by deal structure, and Morbius is the film that makes that absence most felt. Morbius is a Spider-Man villain. He works in the comics as an antagonist for a specific hero with a specific moral code. Without that hero to push against, he is simply a man with a bat condition and a conscience, which is a much harder pitch.

The post-credits scene in which Michael Keaton’s Vulture appears in the SSU universe and approaches Morbius about forming a team of some kind is one of the more inexplicable sequences in recent superhero cinema. It arrives without meaningful setup, resolves nothing, and was never followed up in any subsequent SSU film. It exists, seemingly, to signal franchise ambitions that never materialised.

🎬 Production Craft: Technically Competent, Never Distinctive

Director Daniel Espinosa is not the problem with Morbius, though he cannot fix the problems he inherited. His 2017 film Life — a tense sci-fi horror thriller starring Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal — showed a director who could build sustained atmosphere, manage practical effects with skill, and deliver genuine dread. Morbius shows the same director constrained by a script that will not let him deviate from the formula long enough to establish any equivalent atmosphere.

The bat-transformation sequences are visually competent. The sound design around Morbius’s echolocation — the world rendered as a rippling wave of sound rather than light — is the film’s most distinctive idea, and it is used effectively in the early sequences before being largely abandoned. The production design is a generic urban thriller palette: dark streets, industrial spaces, laboratories. Nothing is ugly. Nothing is memorable.

At 104 minutes the film is the appropriate length for what it has to say, which is not much. It does not overstay its welcome because it barely has a welcome to overstay.

Is Morbius worth watching?

Once, if you are completing the SSU and want the full picture. It is not offensively bad, just thoroughly uninteresting. The film follows every origin-story formula beat without the energy or wit to make them feel like anything other than boxes being ticked. Watch it once, form your own opinion, then go back to Venom to remember what the SSU can be at its best.

What is the Morbius meme about?

After the film’s poor reception, the internet invented a counter-narrative in which Morbius was a secret masterpiece. Phrases like “It’s Morbin’ Time” and “Morbin’ season” went viral, sparking a genuine fake-demand campaign that convinced Sony to theatrically re-release the film, where it earned approximately $85,000 on opening day. The people who had been shouting about Morbin’ season were, it turned out, not going to the cinema. The meme cycle is genuinely one of the more creative pieces of collective internet mockery in recent cinema history.

Is Morbius connected to Spider-Man?

Technically yes, in the loosest possible sense. Morbius is a Spider-Man villain in the comics, and the film includes a post-credits scene in which Adrian Toomes, the MCU Vulture played by Michael Keaton, appears in the SSU universe and approaches Morbius about forming a team. The scene makes limited narrative sense and was not followed up in any meaningful subsequent film. It gestures at a Sinister Six-style team-up that never happened.

Who directed Morbius?

Daniel Espinosa, a Swedish director best known for the 2017 sci-fi thriller Life with Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal. Life was a genuinely tense, well-crafted film. Morbius suggests that directorial skill matters less than the quality of the source material and the creative latitude given by the studio, neither of which Espinosa received in sufficient quantity here.

Is Morbius suitable for kids?

It is rated PG-13 for vampire violence and some disturbing imagery. The content is not extreme by superhero film standards, but the bat-creature transformation sequences are designed to be unsettling. Children under 12 should skip it. Teenagers will be fine with the content, though they will likely find it as underwhelming as everyone else. There are better PG-13 choices in the superhero catalogue for teenage viewers.