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Morbius: Jared Leto Releases First Full Look At Sony’s Living Vampire
Jared Leto has revealed a fuller look at himself as Michael Morbius in Sony's Morbius the Living Vampire movie. While Sony will continue to share Spider-Man with Marvel Studios for the foreseeable future, they're also developing a separate line of films about the web-slinger's more redeemable enemies and complicated antiheroes. The first of those movies, Venom, hit theaters last fall and failed to wow critics, but went on to gross $855 million at the global box office on a $100 million budget. With those kind of returns, it's no wonder Sony is moving forward with Venom 2 for a potential October 2020 release date.
Between now and then, however, Sony will release Morbius, another film based around a dark superhero from the Spider-Man comic book universe. Leto is starring in the film as Dr. Morbius, a scientist who tries to cure himself of a rare blood disease, only to gain vampire-like abilities in the process. Leto teased his appearance as Morbius shortly after production got underway near the start of March, and has once again offered his followers on social media a glimpse of the man behind the "vampire".
Leto posted the following clip of himself on the Moribus set to his Instagram account this week, providing a better look at his character in the film.
As far as his appearance here goes, Morbius looks like a fairly ordinary (if scruffy) man in a hoodie. The character is typically portrayed as strikingly pale in the comics, with gaunt features and little to no facial hair (save for a small goatee). Presumably, this clip is from a scene in the movie where either Dr. Morbius is hiding his vampiric qualities from the world or has yet to actually experiment on himself. It also stands to reason that Leto's full-blown vampiric form will bear a relatively close resemblance to the character in the comics. After all, for all the criticisms of Leto's take on Joker in Suicide Squad, he was generally faithful to the villain's traditional appearance (the added flourishes like his tattoos and teeth fillings aside). And much like Tom Hardy in Venom, the actor's performance here promises to be far weirder than his comic book-inspired look.
Beyond that, it'll be interesting to see if Morbius feels more like a traditional vampire movie than a typical superhero film. The movie's writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless previously worked on Universal's Dracula Untold, which was essentially a dark superhero origin story (one featuring an iconic movie monster) in its own right. Morbius director Daniel Espinosa comes from more of a sci-fi horror background by comparison, having previously helmed the film Life (a project that, as some have joked, could've been a Venom prequel with just a few tweaks). Either way, their sensibilities seem to lend themselves well to Sony's latest peculiar comic book offering.
Morbius (2020) release date: Jul 31, 2020
