Box office Morbius grossed $73.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $93.6 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $167.5 million. The film earned $17.3 million on its first day, including $5.7 million from Thursday preview screenings. It went on to debut to $39 million, beating expectations and finishing first at the box office. In its second weekend of release in the U.S. and Canada, the film grossed $10.2 million and finished second behind
Sonic the Hedgehog 2, while experiencing a drop of 74%, the second-worst of all time for a superhero movie, behind only
Steel (1997), and the worst of any tentpole superhero movie. It fell to sixth place at the box office in its third weekend, grossing $4.7 million (a drop of 54%), and dropped to ninth place in its fourth weekend with $2.3 million (a drop of 51%). The film earned $1.5 million in its fifth weekend, finishing tenth.
Morbius dropped out of the box office top ten in its sixth weekend. The film's "re-release" in theaters during its tenth weekend made $310,665 from 1,037 screens during its first three days. Outside the U.S. and Canada, the film earned $44.9 million from 62 international markets in its opening weekend, including $2.5 million from
IMAX screens. It added $15 million in its second weekend for a drop of 62%. It added $6.7 million in the third weekend, $3.3 million in its fourth, and $1.6 million in its fifth. On June 3, 2022, Sony announced the film would return to 1,000 theaters weeks after its initial theatrical and digital release. This was largely attributed to the film's influx in attention from Internet memes in the weeks prior. This decision was also met with criticism from various outlets, which speculated that the release was because Sony was unaware that the Internet trend was not due to legitimate popular admiration towards the film. Upon its re-release the film performed very poorly, making only $85,000 on the day it was released, with many outlets claiming the film
bombed for a second time. After a dismal $300,000 weekend performance in its re-release—a $289 per-theater average—Sony pulled the film entirely from theaters; it was the 14th highest-grossing film domestically for its short re-release period. It ranks as the 18th worst-reviewed superhero movie on the site.
Metacritic assigned the film a
weighted average score of 35 out of 100 based on 55 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".
Indo-Asian News Service described the film as having been "utterly ravaged" by critics, and
Variety reported reception as being "comically bad". Jonathon Crump of
Manchester Evening News reported that early reviews to the film are mixed at best, although he noted that some critics "praised the acting in the film, including Leto's performance".
Varietys Ellise Shafer also said while the reviews were negative overall, Smith "did receive some praise for his performance". Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while those at
PostTrak gave it a 62% positive score (with an average 2.5 out of 5 stars), with 47% saying they would definitely recommend it. Reviewing the film for
Collider, Emma Kiely felt that the "central problem of
Morbius is a lazy and uninspiring script" and added that "no weight or depth is given to any character." She also noted that there is "little humor" in the film and "when it tries to make a tongue-in-cheek joke, it fails miserably." Barry Hertz of
The Globe and Mail panned the film, saying it "is charmless, incoherent, ugly and so aggressively stupid that it defies any attempt to shove it into the desperate 'guilty pleasure' box." Wendy Ide of
The Observer gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, calling it an "incoherent, vampire-themed Marvel offcut." Hannah Strong of
Little White Lies also gave the film 1 out of 5 stars, describing it as "soulless, tedious filmmaking".
Richard Roeper of the
Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film 2 out of 4 stars, saying: "It looks like
Morbius might soon cross paths with Spider-Man in one universe or another, but that would be a big step up for him, because his introductory vehicle feels more like a just-average 1990s vampire movie."
Mick LaSalle of the
San Francisco Chronicle awarded the film a 3 out of 4 and called the film "briskly riveting" and a "perfect antidote to bloated
The Batman". Chris Bumbray of
JoBlo.com gave the film a 6 out of 10 and called it "a decent enough start for the latest addition to the
Sony Spider-Man Universe" while also praising the cinematography and "horror aspects" of the plot. Leah Greenblatt of
Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B grade, saying that Leto "hits the right notes of fear and longing in a surprisingly restrained performance".
Stephanie Zacharek of
Time commended Leto's performance writing that it has a "quietly vibrating vulnerability". In a 2 out of 5 review, Donald Clarke of
The Irish Times said, "No harm to Leto, who wears less makeup as a vampire here than he did as a human in
House of Gucci, but he appears to be taking the silly role absurdly seriously."
The Hollywood Reporters David Rooney said the film "only intermittently matches the intensity" of Leto's performance and wrote: "It's just a shame this opening salvo takes itself too seriously to have much fun with the mayhem, despite the potential in Smith's devilish turn for amusing interplay between the antagonists." Matt Donato of
IGN, who awarded the film a 5 out of 10, praised Smith's performance for providing a "colorfulness the film desperately needs", saying that his "flamboyance and spirit is the antithesis to Leto's drearily dour genius, which is a purposeful but inefficient comparison", and unfavorably compared Leto's solemn performance to Tom Hardy's "
campy" performance in the
Venom films." The post-credits scenes also came under heavy scrutiny and became a joke in the eyes of the general public due to the failed
fan service, confusing and incoherent explanation, and dialogue. Kate Erbland of
IndieWire stated, "This is confusing stuff, and the appearance of Keaton in a pair of [mid-credits] scenes does little to help the sense that
Morbius is mostly incoherent, or at least very at odds with whatever it's trying to say." Julia Glassman of
The Mary Sue found the overall reveal weak, stating, "I'm beginning to wonder if Sony just... doesn't quite
get the point of [mid-credits] scenes."
Time Outs Cathy Brennan felt that the film's "attempts" to "court an audience by dangling a potential connection" to the MCU's Spider-Man is "the worst kind of unearned fan service in a film this lacklustre."
Other responses In August 2022, Matt Smith said of the film's reception, "Yeah, it was thrown under the bus. But you just have to roll with it. What else are you gonna do? It's a film, at the end of the day, we're not saving lives. For whatever reason, it didn't quite work out and… It is what it is." In September 2024, Jared Harris said he took his role in the film to pay off a mortgage, and added, "I have observed that those types of films do well if you have a sense of humour. You can't treat it as though it's Shakespeare. So yeah, that movie could have done with a more mischievous sense of humour." Two years after the film's release, Espinosa expressed regret over making the film, stating, "To make a movie through committee, I think, is very hard, and I felt in the end that maybe a different director would have been a better fit."
Accolades At the
43rd Golden Raspberry Awards,
Morbius received nominations for
Worst Picture,
Worst Director, and
Worst Screenplay; and won
Worst Actor and
Worst Supporting Actress.
Internet memes Due to its lackluster box office performance and dour critical reception,
Morbius inspired various
Internet memes. Claims included the film becoming the first to sell over a trillion tickets, receiving an impossible 203% or higher approval rating (and similarly-impossible 142% or higher audience rating) from Rotten Tomatoes, and an edited screenshot of the
Wikipedia page covering the
highest-grossing films, with
Morbius supposedly having earned $352.9 trillion. The film received a resurgence in Internet memes following its release to
video on demand, with many involving the fake catchphrase "it's Morbin' time", and/or the
Ben Grimm catchphrase "It's Clobberin' Time". Users on the film's official
Discord server call themselves "Morbheads", and users engaged in "Morbin on various Discord servers by
distributing pirated copies. A large number of channels on the live-streaming service
Twitch began illegally hosting the entire film on repeat; one channel, Morbius247, was banned after acquiring thousands of followers.
Morbius piracy spread to other platforms, including
Twitter, where the entire film was posted in a series of 52 two-minute long videos, compressed into a 30-second long video, and the entire script copy-and-pasted into individual tweets. On
Tumblr, the entire film was compressed into a minuscule
GIF file and widely spread. Additionally, viral
fake news posts claiming that a
Morbius sequel had been greenlit as a result of the Internet memes spread on Twitter, leading "
Morbius 2" to trend on the website, in addition to the phrase "it's Morbin' time" trending on Twitter for a week. Leto, in response to the memes, tweeted "What time is it?" and a 19-second video where he was "caught" reading a script titled ''Morbius 2: It's Morbin' Time'' "written" by himself under the pseudonym
Bartholomew Cubbins. Following the financial failure of the re-release, a petition was started on
Change.org to put the film back in theaters for a third time with the claim that "we were all busy that weekend". == Future ==