Morbius’ Morbin Comeback to the Theaters: Was it a Success?

Memes, the DNA of the soul. And one of the latest chromosomes added to the never-ending double helix is that of one of Sony’s newest movies: Morbius.

If you’ve been out of the loop, here’s the down-low on what’s been happening with this film. Morbius is the latest Marvel-Sony film. The Marvel-Sony universe itself is a pretty complicated topic, it involves specific IPs (Intellectuals Properties) that Sony owns film rights for such as Venom and Morbius but shares some rights with the mighty Marvel empire. It’s honestly a discussion for another day.

What matters most for now is that the movie… didn’t do too good… to say the least.

Morbius had a budget that was rumored to be about $75-83 million. The movie was initially released on April 1, 2022. By the end of May, the movie has earned $73.3 million at the domestic box office and $89.6 million at the international box office ending up with a total of $162.9 million and making a profit of only $80-88 million.

By comparison, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore which was released just 2 weeks later, has so far earned about $200 million.

And then came the memes. All around the internet, memes that poked fun at Morbius and its main protagonist Dr. Michael Morbius started circulating.

The memes were mainly hilarious edited photos that claimed that Morbius is the greatest movie to have ever been made. The catchphrase “It’s Morbin time” also started spreading. It’s all really amusing, take a look for yourself at some of these samples below.

As memes usually do, they just kept coming and coming for weeks. But just when it seemed like the meme was starting to dissipate, Sony made the wild decision to put Morbius back into the theaters. This was either a misread on their part (as tons of memes were demanding for the movie to make a comeback or even for a sequel) or them making the most out of the trend. Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Comeback Results

So, Morbius once again started showing in over 1,000 theaters across the U.S. on June 3. So, how’d that go? As of today, the second wave of Morbius has earned $300,000… still no good. Even Fantastic Beasts, which is pretty much already on its way out, earned $380,000 this week.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen memes influence massive multi-million-dollar film companies to do something major or even alter parts of their movies.

Relatively recently we’ve seen memes convince another big film to change its ways. I’m talking about Sonic the (human-toothed) Hedgehog. If you don’t know the story, the trailer for the first Sonic The Hedgehog live-action film featured a poorly designed Sonic which the internet did not care for that much. Constant pestering convinced Paramount Pictures themselves to correct the design to a more favorable one.

Sometimes it works, but sometimes it Morbs.

Instead of Morbin, why not try Mobin? Here’s some recent news about the third season of Mob Psycho.