Earlier in the week, Sony announced their plans to bring their vampire/superhero-ish movie Morbius back into theaters this weekend. The film—which, in case you’ve forgotten, only came out like two months ago—starred Jared Leto as the titular Doctor Michael Morbius and was honestly nothing to write home about. Surely worse superhero movies exist, but better ones also do as well, and the box office reflected that pretty handily at the time. But the film’s become a meme on Twitter in recent weeks, and that meme is unfortunately now ruined, because Leto and Sony have both attempted to get in on the joke.
On Friday, Leto posted a video of himself looking over a script. After pretending to hide it from the camera person, the title page is shown: Morbius 2: It’s Morbin’ Time, written by Bartholomew Cubbins. “It’s Morbin’ Time,” if you’re not aware, has become the memetic phrase used whenever the film’s been brought up on social media. It, along with the film having a tie-in game on last and current-gen consoles, are two of the bigger memes relating to the film, and the phrase is honestly pretty fun to say in a particular way.
Leto’s video, however, isn’t particularly funny. Partially it’s the buildup; if he’d maybe done a tweet before Sony’s official confirmation of the movie coming back to theaters, then the video, perhaps it would’ve been chuckle worthy. Heck, if he just did some extra VO for a trailer, that could’ve been delightfully absurd. But the bigger issue is that it’s trying to be in on the joke in a very “dad using slang he heard from his kids” way. It’d have been just as cringe if he posted his own Morbius fancam. (The film’s Twitter does a little bit of a better job at being self-aware, though.)
Rarely are memes still funny after the subject itself tries to acknowledge them. This is always what makes Sony’s decision to re-release the film all the more strange, if not Morbi(us)dly fascinating. Sony may know they’re being made fun of and swinging for the fences anyway, or they don’t. Either scenario is equally funny, but we’ll see how that ends up working in their favor when we get box office reports. Until then, it is sadly no longer Morbin’ time. It was nice while it lasted.
[Correction: 12:12 PM ET: This post previously said that the film was coming to theaters again on July 1. Not true! It’s actually being re-released right now, and has been changed to reflect that.]
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