A Lesson from the Failed Re-Release of Morbius: The Internet Is Not Real Life

It was not, in fact, “Morbin’ Time.”

On April 1, Sony released Morbius, which tells the story of Dr. Michael Morbius, who suffers from a rare blood condition for which there is no cure. He captures dozens of bats for a longshot of an operation that he hopes will rid him of his disease.

The cure works, but it has the unfortunate side effect of turning the title character, played by Jared Leto, into a vampire with super powers, driving him to commit acts of evil. Morbius must then choose whether to develop a new cure or embrace his identity as a vampire at the expense of those he loves.

The film enjoyed relative success at the box office, bringing in over $173 million worldwide, more than double its reported budget of $75 million. While the movie reportedly will make a profit for the studio, the critics despised it, giving it a 17 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

“Cursed with uninspired effects, rote performances, and a borderline nonsensical story, this dreary mess is a vein [sic] attempt to make Morbius happen,” the “Critics Consensus” read.

Audiences, on the other hand, were much warmer, giving the movie a 71%. All-in-all, the release was no great blockbuster or cultural phenomenon like Spider-Man: No Way Home, but it was not an absolute disaster for Sony.

That changed when the movie released on digital.

On May 26, a user on the streaming site Twitch, operating under the username “Morbius247,” began streaming the movie on a loop. The channel spammed the chat with the messages “I love Morbius,” “It’s Morbin’ time,” and “Morbius Sweep,” a reference to a hope that the movie would sweep the Oscars.

The channel and its stream remained operational for a surprisingly long time before it was shut down due to violations of Twitch’s copyright policy, and the opportunity to watch Morbius for free gave the internet the incentive to make the movie into a meme.

In the days following the stream, Internet users ironically espoused their love for the movie with “Morbin’ Time” memes, leading some large brands to riff on them. Some Twitter users tried to manifest a Morbius 2, while others pointed out that the movie had a higher audience score on Rotten Tomatoes than Captain Marvel.

Even Leto himself joined in the fun. On June 3, he posted a video of him reading the screenplay for a fake movie entitled Morbius 2: It’s Morbin’ Time.

Sony executives must have mistaken the memes for fandom because, on the day before Leto posted his video, the company made the decision to put Morbius back into 1,000 theaters for the weekend.

The result was a massive box-office flop. Over the weekend of the re-release, the movie brought in only about $300,000, approximately $300 per theater.

Morbius’s failure taught Sony a valuable lesson that we can apply to our politics: The Internet is not real life. Simply because people make something trend on Twitter or another social-media platform does not guarantee real-world philosophical or electoral consequences.

We saw it in 2020. Over the summer, social media was awash with black squares in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. On Election Day, however, Democrats suffered more than a few losses in the House of Representatives, which some in the party attributed to their association with calls to “defund the police.”

With data from Pew Research center, we see it on an empirical level in addition to the anecdotal. Over the past year, Pew has found that only about one-fifth of U.S. adults use Twitter, that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use almost any given social-media platform, and that 25 percent of Twitter users produce 97 percent of tweets.

It is understandable that we give so much deference to social media given how ubiquitous it seems, but, if we confuse the bubble for the real world, we run the risk of looking like fools.