(Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Releasing) “Sony released “Morbius” in March of 2022 to largely negative reactions as well as social media memes.”
Riley Fontana
Connector Staff
Marvel has a monopoly on superhero movies, and in April of 2022 they unknowingly released their first villain film: “Morbius”. The film tells the story of Dr. Michael Morbius and his path to becoming a villain. The story opens on Morbius and his friend Milo as children who are both incredibly sick with a rare disease that has no cure. It is shown that Morbius has always been unusually smart from childhood, saving Milo at one point with just a ball point pen. He grows up to become a doctor and saves more people than penicillin somehow.
And then begins the villain arc. Imagine for me if you will: finding a cure for this disease that is more than likely going to kill you very young, and it is severely limiting your best friend’s life and you find the cure. You would allow them to have that cure right? Even if the side effects are a little odd, but you have a way to keep these side effects at bay. Morbius creates this cure and refuses to give it to Milo because of the side effect: needing blood to keep the effects of the disease at bay. Morbius has a fake type of blood that helps to keep these effects away and he still refuses to give it to his friend. Something only a villain would do I think.
During the post credit scenes we see Morbius free Vulture, the villain from Spider-Man Homecoming, from prison and link up for what we can imagine would be the Morbius sequel I doubt we will get. This further adds to the theory that Morbius is a villain, as no hero would work with a villain for any reason. Now I know Milo is the scripted villain of the movie because he takes the cure without permission, drinks blood from innocent humans and has that whole dance scene which felt like something only an evil person could do, but I am not here to talk about Milo. I am here to talk about Morbius.
Outside of the actual plot of working with a villain there is more in the film to prove my theory. There is an entire scene where Morbius overthrows a counterfeit money ring for no other reason than to use their space and equipment. As if he isn’t a world famous doctor who could afford to lease space in a dead mall and buy the equipment he needed to make the cure. At the time he had started working with another doctor, Martine, who still had access to the hospital and all the gear they could have needed. He takes away from people trying to make a living for his own uses when he simply did not have to.
At the very end of Morbius a large swarm of bats is summoned to aid in the fight against Milo. Do you know how damaging that will be to New York City? This is a swarm of hundreds of vampire bats that are not seen to be gathered and contained again; they just spread out into the night as Morbius flees. Not only will this be damaging to the wildlife in New York, but these bats will immediately suffer because they were previously living in a lab used for scientific research.
There is also the background of Morbius being a villain in the comic books. Introduced to be an enemy to Spider-Man, Marvel did not seem to want to take this stance in the film. They tried to make him somewhat decent and caring by even giving him a love interest. Morbius is a villain through and through. The last piece of this theory I will leave you with is that he is played by Jared Leto and he has a track record of playing villains, most famously his take on the Joker.
