Morbius Has Memed Itself Back Into Theaters

Once again, it’s Morbin’ time.

After becoming a meme of legendary proportions, Morbius is returning to theaters. It only makes sense that a movie about a character that’s essentially a vampire would return from the dead. That being said, this is absurd, right?

This kinda thing doesn’t just happen, and it could very well be the first time any film has been dragged back into theaters by a meme. It’s not that Morbius is back by popular demand or anything like that. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. We don’t know if Sony is absolutely insane or really smart for this, but we’ll just have to see. It’s clear that they still care about the film to some degree, or they wouldn’t have taken the Twitch stream down.

Morbius pretty much bombed in U.S. box offices, in addition to receiving terrible reviews. Apparently, though, it did much better in international markets than it did here. That means that technically, Morbius did make its budget back. So why is Sony taking such a big risk?

The difficult part about all of this is that the call for the return of Morbius to theaters isn’t actually there. It never was. Nobody who talks about how Morbius is the first movie to make one Morbillion dollars actually saw the movie. Anyone online talking about how they’re “Morbpilled” has probably just jumped on the meme bandwagon. How did Sony mistake all of this for genuine enthusiasm?

There are two possible explanations here. The first option is that Sony and the entertainment industry as a whole have no real sense of irony. They make movies that people want to see, (ideally) and not movies that will become cult classics because of memes. But Sony doesn’t get that. Sony sees people talking positively about the movie, and assumes that it’s immediately having a renaissance.

The other option is that Sony knows exactly what they’re doing here. They’re cashing in on a joke because they understand that we live in a post-ironic world now. That’s the ticket to Gen-Z. If someone can spend 20 bucks going to the movie theater with their friends to make Morbius jokes, they’ll do it. But it’s not that seeing Morbius is going to be fun … it’s going to be a slog that feels entirely too long. By all accounts, the film is boring beyond belief. It’s not… so-bad-its-good, it’s just bad.

Anyway, starting on Friday, Morbius is going to be appearing in theaters once again, on about 1,000 screens for the next week.