They say that a person should never invite a vampire into one’s house, but what about a vampire inviting a person into a movie theater? It seems that a modest amount of viewers are accepting that request, as Columbia Pictures’ “Morbius,” starring Jared Leto, is sinking its teeth into the domestic box office’s top spot with an opening weekend upwards of $38 million from 4,268 locations.
That’s a fairly moderate opening figure for a film adapted from Marvel comics. “Morbius,” the latest entry in the studio’s self-branded Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters (which also includes Tom Hardy’s two “Venom” movies and the upcoming “Kraven the Hunter”), took in $17.1 million in its opening day at the domestic box office, a figure that includes a healthy $5.7 million in Thursday previews.
With a $75 million production budget, “Morbius” is a less imposing financial investment for Sony than the usual comic book action spectacle. However, the film was hindered by numerous theatrical release delays due to COVID-19, finding its way to April 2022 after initially being set for July 2020. That schedule shuffling likely led to numerous marketing reboots that made “Morbius” a bit more costly.
“Morbius” will have to put up some decent holds in order to secure itself as a financial win for Sony. The Marvel film was utterly ravaged by critics, turning in a dismal 17% aggregate approval score on Rotten Tomatoes. Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman called it “a movie in which it’s clear that no one ever sent the script back for a rewrite with the instructions, ‘Please add a script.’ As in: Add spice, add dialogue, add something so that the movie plays like more than a barely colored-in diagram.” How audience numbers pan out in the days ahead will indicate word-of-mouth for ticket buyers.
Directed by Daniel Espinosa, “Morbius” stars Jared Leto as the titular Dr. Michael Morbius, a genius whose rare blood disease leads him to transform himself into a vampire. The cast also includes Adria Arjona, Tyrese Gibson, Matt Smith, Jared Harris and Michael Keaton.
More to come…