Once the reviews began rolling in to confirm that Morbius was indeed as terrible as many people were expecting it to be, the movie’s opening weekend box office became more important than ever.
The good news is that Jared Leto’s debut as the superhuman scientist who accidentally transforms himself into a vampire debuted to a robust $39 million, not a bad return for one of the worst-reviewed Marvel Comics adaptations in the history of cinema.
Of course, we should point out that it was the fourth-lowest bow for a live-action Marvel blockbuster in 10 years, while it also bagged the second-lowest CinemaScore for any of the company’s big screen outings. One minor positive is that Morbius only cost $75 million to produce, which is just as well because earnings have fallen off a cliff.
In its second Friday playing on the big screen, Morbius earned a meager $2.95 million, an alarming 83% drop. That’s tied with Dark Phoenix for the harshest plummet suffered by any big budget superhero film, and it’s dipped by 75% through its sophomore weekend, which is another unwanted record.
Morbius is at least tracking ahead of Dark Phoenix and the infamous Fantastic Four reboot on a day-by-day basis, so we’ll be very curious to see if the latest installment in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe turns enough of a profit for Sony to give the green light to a sequel that we’re pretty sure nobody wants to see, or if they’ll even keep Leto around for the inevitable Sinister Six crossover we all know is coming eventually.