After being delayed several times and many months from its original July 2020 release date, Morbius finally made it to theaters on April Fools’ Day. It was not in any way worth the wait. Sony’s latest Spider-Verse film might very well go down as one of the worst movies that Marvel has ever been associated with—and there have been some bad Marvel movies in the past few decades. From continuity errors and previously teased scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut of the movie to straight-up baffling storytelling choices, Morbius is an absolute mess that takes itself far too seriously for a superhero movie about a scientist who turns himself into a blood-sucking vampire after splicing his DNA with that of vampire bats. Several days after seeing this 104-minute train wreck, my mind is still racing with questions about what I witnessed. Even director Daniel Espinosa and Dr. Michael Morbius himself, Jared Leto, probably couldn’t explain much of what transpired on screen. Nonetheless, here are my 42 questions about Morbius and its equally confounding post-credits scenes:
1. Did Jared Harris know what Morbius was about when he signed up for it?
2. Where did Milo get all of his money? He’s evidently loaded from the moment he first appears as a child at the beginning of the film, yet even after he starts funding Dr. Morbius’s “experimental” research years later, there’s never any explanation of where all this cash is coming from.
3. Maybe I missed something, but why did Morbius turn down the Nobel Prize? Was it really because he hadn’t found a cure for his rare blood disease yet, so he wasn’t satisfied? Creating synthetic blood that would save millions of lives wasn’t good enough?
4. When Morbius and Martine are getting ready to test Morbius’s “cure” on a boat, whose idea was it to subtitle the boat’s location as “International Waters” after Morbius says they need to travel to international waters? Couldn’t we just say the location and leave it at that?
5. Hold on, is that Long Island in the distance?
6. Why did all these hired mercenaries bring guns onto the boat, anyway? They were traveling with a pair of doctors who were conducting experiments. Were they anticipating that one of them would turn into a hyper-violent vampire?
7. According to National Geographic, a colony of 100 vampire bats can drink the blood of 25 cows in one year. That’s a lot of blood. But more importantly, that’s a lot of cow blood. No offense to the cattle of the world, but can we just get Morbius a few cows to feed on and call it a day?
8. OK, I get the thirst for blood, the echolocation abilities—all the bat-related stuff. Morbius spliced his DNA with vampire bat DNA, so now he’s got bat powers. But why is my guy so goddamned ripped now?
9. When Morbius goes into his Bat Radar mode, why is everything so smokey all of a sudden?
10. Twenty-five years after we see Jared Harris meet young Michael Morbius, the man hasn’t aged a day. What’s your skin-care routine, Dr. Nicholas?
11. Did anyone get Pokémon vibes from Morbius? Because I, for one, did not, and I have no idea what director Daniel Espinosa is talking about when he says that it served as an inspiration for his film.
12. Why didn’t anyone question how Morbius—a world-renowned scientist who just turned down a Nobel Prize, because he’s that cool—was suddenly able to walk around without any crutches and also probably bench-press a car?
13. Between Martine in Morbius and Selina Kyle in The Batman, what do these beautiful women keep seeing in these creepy Batmen? I guess I can sort of see the mysterious appeal of Emo Robert Pattinson, and Morbius did just have the biggest Marvel glow-up since a scrawny Steve Rogers transformed into Captain America. But seriously, this isn’t a red flag?
14. When Morbius got his vampire injection, he needed help from a doctor to carefully find the point of entry on his spine before administering it. How did Milo manage to do all that by himself?
15. Wait, when did Tyrese get here?
16. Who told Tyrese he wasn’t allowed to have any fun in this movie? I guess his partner (Al Madrigal) is having enough fun for the two of them, but this seems like a missed opportunity to me.
17. Speaking of Tyrese, did he really fall for a fake quote in which Martin Scorsese supposedly called Morbius the “truest height of cinema?”
18. When Milo visits Morbius in jail, he convinces the security guards that he is Morbius’s lawyer, and then he proceeds to leave both his cane and a pack of blood in Morbius’s cell without anyone seeming to notice. Did Milo pay off the guards with his mysterious money, or are these just the worst jailers ever?
19. Is there a version of Morbius where half of the movie is just Matt Smith feeding on humans and dancing over their bodies afterward? If so, I think I’d prefer that film to the one we got.
20. After multiple victims were found dead with their blood drained from their bodies, the nickname given to the murder suspect by news outlets is … “The Vampire Killer”? If J. Jonah Jameson is good for anything, the man knows how to come up with catchy nicknames. Did Jameson keep all the good headlines to himself in another Spider-Verse, or is this version of New York City just fed up with having guys like Venom around?
21. In the Morbius trailer, Tyrese’s Simon Stroud has a bionic arm (see below), but that detail is absent in the movie. At one point, Stroud thanks Morbius for creating the synthetic blood that helped save his arm, so that might fill in some of the missing details of the story of Stroud’s arm that probably got lost in one of Morbius’s many cuts. But what’s going on here?
22. Is Morbius’s patient Anna … OK? After he has to put her into a medically induced coma early in the movie, everyone seems to forget about her. Hopefully Morbius didn’t turn her into a vampire, but the alternative is just as bleak, since he never actually found a cure that didn’t come with some pretty severe side effects.
23. Was composer Jon Ekstrand listening to the Dark Knight trilogy score on repeat when he was working on the Morbius score?
24. At the end of the movie, why did Martine turn into a vampire when none of the other victims did? Is it because she decided to bite Morbius’s lip and drink his blood in their final goodbye, before Morbius drank her blood too? (Also, WTF?)
25. Why didn’t Morbius come back for Martine’s body after he killed Milo? Like, you’re really going to just feed on your dead girlfriend’s blood and then leave her corpse on a roof? I guess Morbius really isn’t a hero, huh?
26. What happened to Morbius’s master plan of taking the anticoagulant for himself after killing Milo? Did he have second thoughts and decide he is up for tasty human blood consumption now?
27. Let’s talk about those two stingers. The first one reveals a mysterious, purple rift in the sky, forewarning the arrival of Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), the main villain in Tom Holland’s Spider-Man: Homecoming. After Toomes gets released from prison at the end of the scene (because his crimes were committed in another universe), the second stinger finds him meeting Morbius and proposing a team-up. First question: Why?
28. I thought the whole point of Spider-Man: No Way Home was to get villains back to their respective universes, so how did Adrian Toomes get sent to another universe?
29. Why did Toomes appear in a universe where Venom and Morbius exist, of all places? (OK, fine, I know the answer to this one—money!—but come on, is the freakin’ multiverse really that small?)
30. Why is Morbius driving to a remote location to meet with Toomes if he can fly now? Has he not seen how high gas prices are?
31. Why is Sony so enamored of the Sinister Six? A Sinister Six movie starring Andrew Garfield was once slated for release in 2016 before it got scrapped, and then it seemed as if Sony was gearing up again for a Spidey supervillain team-up when Mac Gargan (the villainous Scorpion) approached Toomes in prison in a Spider-Man: Homecoming post-credits scene. (Not to mention how No Way Home featured the Spider-Men facing off against five of their most infamous villains at once.) Is a Sinister Six movie ever going to stick, and do we really even need one at this point?
32. Is Michael Keaton contractually required by Sony to appear in every Sinister Six teaser?
33. Does Toomes realize that his version of Spider-Man isn’t even in this universe? And if his family isn’t around in this universe either—though maybe he hasn’t noticed that yet either—then what does Toomes want?
34. What, exactly, does Morbius find “intriguing” about teaming up with Vulture? Like five minutes before the movie’s final, anticlimactic, CGI bat fight, Morbius was prepared to die so that this transformative vampire serum he brought into the world would be gone for good, and now he’s ready to team up with full-on villains?
35. How did Vulture get his armor back? It didn’t come with Toomes in the cell, and there isn’t another version of himself in this universe to borrow from either. Hell, the Avengers don’t exist in this universe, so the Battle of New York never happened and there isn’t any alien technology lying around to salvage. Where did Toomes get the materials to rebuild this thing?
36. Are we sure that was still Michael Keaton under all that CGI in the second stinger?
37. How did Vulture get Morbius’s cell number?
38. It looks like the new Sony Spider-Verse Sinister Six will feature Vulture, Morbius, and potentially Venom. The upcoming Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, likely will introduce a fourth member in its titular villain. Who would the last two members of the villainous group be, and how does Madame Web fit into everything?
39. Is Sony going to do a Sinister Six movie without Spider-Man?
40. Or does this mean that Garfield might return to get a shot at his canceled Sinister Six movie?
41. Why didn’t Morbius question who Spider-Man is when Toomes mentioned him? A poster featuring what looked like Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man appeared in the film’s trailer, but that shot was nowhere to be seen in Morbius. (As for Espinosa’s explanation of the poster’s omission: “If I knew something, I could tell you. [But] it’s not mine. It’s not from my idea, you know?”) One edition of The Daily Bugle also mentions that Rhino is on the loose, which is likely in reference to Paul Giamatti’s, er, unique take on the character in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. So who, exactly, is Spider-Man here?!
42. I thought Eddie Brock and his Venom symbiote/lover moved to New York City. So where is the Lethal Protector? Still honeymooning? Or are they still getting drunk with Dani Rojas from Ted Lasso?
Given that Morbius ends with the titular vampire doctor teaming up with the MCU’s Vulture, this likely won’t be the last time we see Leto’s antihero appear in Sony’s Spider-Verse. Considering Sony’s strange roster of Marvel-related movies, which features Tom Hardy’s Venom franchise and the yet-to-be-released Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web (the latter of which will star Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney), it isn’t clear where the studio is planning on taking this growing cinematic universe while Spider-Man remains in the MCU. But before my brain implodes with Morbius thoughts, or I slowly start to gain an urge to chug a pack of synthetic blood, I’ll leave you all with one last question: Do we really ever need to see Dr. Morbius again?
