Matt Smith is an actor who knows his way around genre work, having played the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who and the T-5000 (the physical embodiment of Skynet) in Terminator Genisys, and he’ll soon be seen as Daemon Targaryen in the Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon. This year also marked Smith’s comic book movie debut, having starred in Morbius as Milo, the surrogate brother to Jared Leto’s Michael. However, the third entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe failed to impress critically and at the box office, and Smith has now shared his thoughts on the Marvel comic book movie bombing.
Following six months after the release of Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which earned better critical reception than its predecessor and made over $506 million worldwide, Morbius, even after being released in theaters twice, only pulled in close to $164 million across the globe and ranks at a measly 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. But Matt Smith isn’t letting Morbius’ underwhelming performance bother him, telling Rolling Stone:
Yeah, it was thrown under the bus. But you just have to roll with it. What else are you gonna do? It’s a film, at the end of the day, we’re not saving lives. For whatever reason, it didn’t quite work out and… It is what it is.
Morbius saw Matt Smith filling the main antagonist role, with Milo, who shared the same blood illness as Michael, taking the same vampiric cure to eliminate his condition, despite warning him of the dangers. With Milo succumbing to his bloodlust, Jared Leto’s character was forced to kill his brother with an antibody that eliminated the vampirism. Cut to four months after its release, Morbius is now arguably more well-known for its memes (which Leto got in on) rather than its actual story, but Smith is ok with the movie simply not clicking with audiences. He carried out his acting duties and is content with Morbius simply being another movie on his resume.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe isn’t going anywhere, as Kraven the Hunter is coming out in January, and Madame Web, El Muerto and Venom 3 are on the way too. As far as Jared Leto’s Morbius the Living Vampire goes, the Morbius movie’s post-credits scene showed him meeting with Michael Keaton’s Vulture, who originated from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but was transported to the Sony universe as a result of the events in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Vulture proposed to Morbius that they form a team, which has since been confirmed to be the Sinister Six, but there’s still no word on where or when we’ll see these two again.
For now, you can see Matt Smith starring opposite actors like Paddy Considine, Emma D’Arcy, Olivia Cooke and Rhys Ifans when House of the Dragon premieres August 21 on HBO. Jared Leto can next be seen in the Haunted Mansion reboot, which is among the slotted 2023 movie releases.
