I feel like Sony Pictures should view this as the joke it clearly is but it’s their movie and they can do with it what they see fit. The critically maligned Morbius didn’t make much of a dent at the box office and it suffered the second-worst drop in superhero genre history at 73% during its second weekend of release but something is brewing on the internet that is making the studio throw the film back on the big screen. Thanks to viral tweets on social media, Morbius is returning to theaters this weekend.
Morbius will be returning in over 1,000 theaters across the U.S. thanks to Morbius-related tweets going viral on Twitter over the past few weeks. A super-fan recently streamed the film on Twitch non-stop for days and fans, or those pretending to be fans, are demanding that Sony green light a sequel. In my opinion, the tweets are clearly a joke and meant to poke fun at the film in some way but it’s possible that some of them are serious and there are fans out there that want more Morbius.
Tweets with the hashtag #MorbiusSweep or #ItsMorbinTime, have definitely been trending on Twitter but it all seems to be done ironically. Users are declaring it the “highest-grossing Morbius movie of all time”, which is clearly a joke, but, maybe Sony is hoping this little spark of viral cult status might give its box office a little bit of a boost.
Morbius made $163 million at the global box office and only $73.3 million of that was grossed domestically. The fact that the film couldn’t even recoup its relatively modest budget of $75 million in the States shows just how poorly received the movie was. Capitalizing on this newest trend, even if it’s turning the movie into more of a joke, might help Sony get that domestic gross right to $75 million. I think they’re aiming low and will be happy with any result at this point.
Will YOU be seeing Morbius on the big screen this weekend when it returns to theaters?