As with any genre, not every superhero movie is going to be well received by everyone, but there is a selection of such movies that are basically derided across the board. One of the most recent examples is Morbius, which saw Jared Leto playing a geneticist who turns into a vampire in an attempt to cure his rare blood disease. The third movie set in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe was a critical and commercial flop (our own Eric Eisenberg gave it just one star out of five in his Morbius review), and that’s despite playing in theaters twice. It sounds like actor Jared Harris knew going when coming aboard that this was one of those jobs he was doing solely for the paycheck.
Harris starred in Morbius as Emil Nichol, the father figure of Michael Morbius and Matt Smith’s Milo Morbius, his surrogate brother. Although the actor said while speaking with iNews that he doesn’t like how Hollywood has been steering towards “ticking boxes” and a “mass-production” approach when it comes to storytelling, he did acknowledge that he agreed to star in Morbius, which definitely fits those categories, for this understandable reason:
Sure, yeah. I have got a mortgage to pay, you know. Sometimes you say yes to things because you need to make money.
Hey, acting is ultimately a job, and while Jared Harris has gained recognition for his roles in projects like Mad Men, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Lincoln, Chernobyl and Foundation (which can be streamed with an Apple TV+ subscription), he still needs enough money to pay the bills. So Morbius certainly won’t go down as his favorite movie to act in, which is even more apparent when he was asked how his time on the movie was, and he responded:
I have observed that those types of films do well if you have a sense of humour. You can’t treat it as though it’s Shakespeare. So yeah, that movie could have done with a more mischievous sense of humour.
At least Jared Harris doesn’t need to worry about reprising Emil Nichol again considering his character was killed off. Although even if that hadn’t happened, there’s been no announcement of Morbius 2 being in development, which isn’t surprising considering how the first movie fared. Frankly, there hasn’t even been any mention about if Jared Leto will reprise the vampire anywhere else in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. If there's any change on that front, we'll let you know.
You’re welcome to judge Morbius for yourself by streaming it with a Disney+ subscription. The next of Sony’s live-action Spider-Man spinoffs, Venom: The Last Dance, arrives October 25 on the 2024 movies schedule, and Kraven the Hunter follows on December 13.
