2022 Was Truly The Year Of Morbius

Warning: This article contains frank discussion of (and occasional snark directed towards) all things Morbin'-related. Reader discretion is advised.

I can pinpoint the exact moment when everything changed forever: January 13, 2020. A little before noon, the unsuspecting world at large was introduced to the first teaser showcasing Jared Leto's Dr. Michael Morbius in all his angsty, brooding, and utterly unhygienic glory. Although it would take more than two years for the superhero antihero film to finally make the jump to theaters, it would be fair to say that the Year of "Morbius" — if it helps, think of it as an even more cursed twist on the Summer of George – first took shape in the Before Times, almost 36 long months ago.

After that fateful day, we ended up having to deal with seemingly nonstop absurdity surrounding the film's perpetually on-hold release. Thanks to an almost unfathomably long pandemic-related delay from its initial release date of July 2020, that meant suffering through more of the leading man's tiresome method acting antics, another studio's bald-faced attempt to put the cart before the horse in chasing the shared universe trend, and the general burden of knowing that, somewhere, somehow, someone actually thought it was a good idea to greenlight another solo movie about a mid-tier Spider-Man villain ... without including Spider-Man. What could possibly go wrong!?

So, naturally, no other movie could better sum up the unpredictable chaos of 2022 as the year finally draws to a close. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! For, truly, 2022 was the Year of "Morbius."

Sometimes, one needs to stare out into the darkness in order to realize that the darkness is staring right back. It should come as no surprise that comic book movies have long acted as a mirror to ourselves, reflecting back our best (and worst) tendencies in simplistic terms that anyone can understand. But while no one should expect the blood-sucking "Morbius" to show up in any of /Film's "Year of the Vampire" features, there is something to be said for how this bat-themed antihero/villain best captures the distinct pop culture temperature of 2022.

For better or worse, maybe "Morbius" is more representative of this past year in movies than we'd like to think. Just look at the evidence! A woefully misguided attempt to recreate the "Venom" phenomenon (Venomenon?) without the camp, humor, or anything else audiences actually liked about those movies. Misplaced trust in the crowd-pleasing appeal of a severely questionable lead. A script patched together with duct tape and dreams. Every decisionmaker wildly overestimating their target audience's willingness to relive the lows of the early aughts superhero experiment. An irony-soaked internet meme that singlehandedly gave the movie the dubious distinction of underperforming twice in theaters. And, lest we forget, there was that bizarre reversal of fortune once the debacle of a film ended up racking up the views when it hit streaming.

Does that sound familiar? During a year particularly marked by wild swings in quality among its superhero offerings, the slow death of the movie star, and streaming continuing to take advantage of an increasingly pessimistic theatrical landscape, guess which movie checks all the relevant boxes? That's right — it's "Morbius." As it turns out, the only constant within the mess of "Morbius" is that there were no constants. It's the movie 2022 deserved.

Let's get one thing straight: It's not remarkable in and of itself that "Morbius" ultimately proved to be such a terrible movie.

Never mind that it's never made entirely clear who Dr. Michael Morbius actually is as a person beyond obsessing over his own impending death, what exactly the debilitating blood disease is that afflicts the good doctor, or even why he and childhood friend-turned-villain Milo (Matt Smith, trying desperately to inject even half the energy that Tom Hardy brought to "Venom") have to fight each other in the first place. Sure, everything just sort of happens, making "Morbius" feel more like an exercise in testing our collective patience rather than a movie with any clear justification for its own existence. And yes, it's practically ennui personified, mostly in the form of a sleepwalking Jared Leto and the unconvincing visual effects plastered all over his face.

But is simple badness enough to make this one forgettable superhero movie in a sea of forgettable superhero movies worthy of commemoration at year's end? Absolutely not.

Instead, it's the fact that somehow, inexplicably, and completely by happenstance, this one self-sustaining meme-cycle of a film managed to tap into a deep, idiosyncratic part of our collective psyche that inspired far more entertainment outside of its runtime than within. The paradoxical appeal of "Morbius" defies conventional wisdom, manifesting in viral-ready memes rather than box office receipts. In that way, Sony executives (not to mention Jared Leto himself) were doomed to never understand the monster they created. The rest of us, however, were blessed with endless amounts of free laughs and sweet, sweet schadenfreude.

There was before "Morbius" and there is after "Morbius." Along the way, we all got to enjoy the Year of "Morbius." We may never see its like again.