SPOILER WARNING: Don’t read if you haven’t seen Morbius, which is currently in theaters. This story covers the post-credits scenes of the film.
After nearly two years of pandemic delays, Morbius has finally hit theaters, expanding Sony’s universe of Marvel characters and expanding the web of Spider-Man villains, who are getting their own origin stories.
Morbius – starring Jared Leto as the biologist-turned-vampire from the Marvel Comics – was originally scheduled for release in July 2020, ahead of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The COVID-19 pandemic has of course turned the world and studio release calendars upside down, and that’s how Morbius landed in theaters this weekend.
And yet, there are a few brief references to the Venom sequel in Morbius, and the two post-credits scenes bring Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes – aka the high-flying villain Vulture, a villain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been imprisoned in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming – into the world of Morbius and Sony’s Marvel Universe (SMU for short).
In the first post-credits scene of Morbius, the effects of Doctor Strange’s spell at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home affect the SMU. Toomes magically appears in an empty prison cell with no idea how he got there. In the second scene, Toomes, somehow reunited with his Vulture suit, is released from prison and meets up with Morbius. He theorizes that Spider-Man is responsible for his messy situation – this is the first time the web-slinger’s name is spoken out in the SMU, having appeared on TV at the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage is. Toomes suggests that he and Morbius team up and “do something good,” to which Morbius replies “intriguingly.”
Sony’s next Marvel film is Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the fierce big game hunter who targets Spider-Man in the comics. With so many Spidey villains getting their own movies, many comic book fans are suspecting that some sort of Sinister Six team-up movie might be in the works.
But in an interview with Variety, Morbius director Daniel Espinosa doesn’t say much more about the future of Sony’s universe — other than “they have a plan.”
Espinosa had more to say about those post-credits scenes, a Spider-Man reference that was cut from the film and who Morbius and Vulture were set to work with next.
Released by Sony Pictures / © Marvel Entertainment / Courtesy Everett Collection
What does Vulture’s proposal to merge with Morbius mean? What are they building on?
Since the release of Venom, Sony has built trust. With Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse serving these writers and directors well, it’s one of the best comic book movies ever made. It also changed the cinematic universe and the way Sony embraced this idea of all these parallel timelines in this film. Now they’re doing Kraven, so I think they’re looking to the future. But I don’t know exactly where they’re going. They’d kill me if I said anything, but I don’t know much. All I know is that they have a plan. And they said there are certain things that are being dug up, like all these questions that are there. Is there a Spider-Man in your universe? Who should it be? Apparently an answer is coming, and I’m looking forward to it.
Is there a Spider-Man in this universe?
You know, because you’ve read the comics, there’s a spider in all these universes because it’s a totem. He is a fundamental being; There’s always a spider on earth.
In one of the trailers there was a poster of Spider-Man that said “Killer” but it wasn’t in the final version of the film. what happened to it
I do the film and then some people do the trailer. When I make the film, everything I put into the film is included. If it’s not in the movie, it’s because I don’t think it should be included. So no, that’s not in the movie.
Were there any other scenes between Morbius and Vulture that you shot that didn’t make it into the final cut?
There was a moment where we toyed more with this idea that it would be more complicated how people would see each other. When you make films you have all these different ideas and then we made the decision to make it pure and put it towards the end because it’s clearer. That’s what people do. There’s not much more, but there’s always something on the cutting room floor.
When was the final scene between them originally filmed?
Many of these Vulture scenes were shot from the beginning. What needed to change was the physiology of how to move between worlds. The idea of moving between worlds was invented by Sony, not the MCU. They did and then I had to adapt. That’s the thing about the Marvel Universe, in the comics it’s always expanding. There are rules that you slowly make up together, but the creators are different. The whole idea of the Marvel Universe is that in order for them to work together, you have to create the collaboration. If you have Chris Claremont working on X-Men, and he’s spoken to Steve Ditko, there are clearly different perspectives, and if J. Michael Straczynski is involved, they need to work together to set those rules.
When they team up with other humans, are Morbius and Vulture more the brawn or the brains?
I think they’re pretty smart, both of them. Vulture is pure mechanical genius. Morbius is considered one of the five great geniuses of the Marvel Universe. As a biologist there are very few other people who have the same strength, perhaps Hank McCoy as the Dark Beast. Wasn’t that a Spider-Man comic where Aunt May was sick? And he gathers Reed Richards, Tony Stark, all the geniuses, and in there is Michael Morbius.
Who do you want Morbius and Vulture to work with in the future?
I think Norman Osborn would be very interesting. It’s a very different idea, it’s like stepping away from the idea of Sinister Six and embracing something different. There are other options because it has been made for so many years. What made Kevin Feige so brilliant for me was the way they took a lot of the mythologies and chose different parts of it and the realization that it doesn’t have to start the way the comics started. You don’t have to go from the 60’s and 70’s to the 80’s and 90’s. You can take from the 2000s which was like the civil war and mix them with other concepts of characters taken from earlier parts of the comic universe.
This interview has been edited and abridged.
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