How Morbius Sucking Impacts Sony’s Sinister Six

According to director Daniel Espinosa—who has made good films and was very gracious about both studio involvement and Leto’s method—Leto would limp around on crutches to fully embody his character’s disabilities…even during bathroom breaks. They subsequently took forever and slowed down production. While Leto’s reputation makes this unsurprising, it is nonetheless disturbing; the star of the film is holding up the making of said film to make a scene. Espinosa doesn’t outright judge what brings out performances for his actors, but it reads like immature antics that are insensitive to actual people with disabilities for the sake of appearing dedicated. Having people wheel you around as a compromise to save time isn’t showing dedication, it’s demanding that others take extra steps to accommodate a misunderstanding of Method acting. This might be easier to swallow if it resulted in a captivating performance or a good movie. Because it does neither, we end up confronted with the stereotypical prima donna self-importance of actors thrust in our faces without anything behind it. Leto is expressing his commitment to his work and his willingness to suffer (or pretend to suffer) for it, but he comes across—as in House of Gucci and Suicide Squad—as a hack.

The response to Morbius inspires questions of where this leaves the larger “Sinister Six” project. Aaron Taylor-Johnson (formerly Pietro Maximoff in Age of Ultron) is set to star in a standalone movie as Kraven the Hunter next year. Venom made eight times its budget and its sequel made five times its budget during the pandemic, so it seems likely that Tom Hardy is safe to return at some point. Perhaps in this case, it’s a matter of the whole film feeling stapled together, including the credits scenes that tie Michael Keaton into the story. Besides his appearances after the movie has already ended, the only indication of a relationship between these Spidey stories was in the marketing, and in Al Madrigal’s Agent Rodriguez vaguely referencing something happening in San Francisco (the setting of Venom). I can understand why Disney’s rivals think they need to put together a multifilm connected continuity to compete, but besides the fact that the process further serializes a medium more fit to standalone stories, they keep desperately rushing the process instead of building it. Universal’s monster-movie Dark Universe died after the unsuccessful Mummy, Zach Snyder’s vision is no longer part of DC’s plans (though they paid him to reshoot and recut Justice League rather than going forward with a pair of Ava DuVernay and James Wan films), and it’s anyone’s guess as to what’s happening with this version of the Sony Spider-Man Universe.

Picking Jared Leto as a pillar of this would-be crossover franchise was a mistake because he engenders controversy that makes a film potentially polarizing without necessarily delivering the sort of remarkable performance he’s just assumed to produce. I’ve heard very little about last year’s The Little Things and 2018’s The Outsider was widely panned. Maybe Leto was simply chosen in the first place because he’s weird. His creepy performance as Niander Wallace in Blade Runner 2049 and the associated short film are some of his best recent work. It seems strange that you have to go back four to nine years to find the last performance by him that people remember fondly, but he got an Oscar for one of those, so I guess the fact that he’s handsome with weird energy means he’ll keep showing up, being weird on set for the cause of bad-to-middling movies forever—or at least until someone produces the cure for Leto fever, which hopefully doesn’t involve any ethically questionable genetic experimentation.

Although Leto is replaceable if Sony wants to hold onto the character—like Disney did by swapping Ed Norton’s Hulk out for Mark Ruffalo—his selection in the first place exemplifies the thinking surrounding this multiverse concept. The acknowledged reality is that calling something a superhero movie and tying it to a more popular IP (like Spider-Man) means it is likely to make money. However, if the actual product under-delivers on financial projections after being critically panned because of bad writing and editing that looks like the result of producer notes, the shared universe will collapse. In just a short time, we already have multiple examples of this.

After the success of The Batman, Warner Bros has made the startling decision with their DC comics adaptations to trust filmmakers to tell stories first and foremost. WB President and CCO Tony Emmerich cited “quality” as more important than shared continuity in superhero films, which he said, “don’t have to all have the same tone, or interlock […] or have an Easter egg that sets up another film.” [Editor’s note: The Batman sadly does have an annoying cameo that sets up another film.] Perhaps these are things Sony should consider. Whatever the collective audience impact of superhero fatigue, Hollywood is a copycat league and companies try to replicate one another’s successes. If Sony-Marvel intends to act as a counter to Disney-Marvel, they had better start by making a good movie, and not assume audiences will like something because it’s related to something else.

Kevin Fox, Jr. is a freelance writer, editor, and critic. He is a former Paste intern with an MA in history, who loves videogames, film, TV, and sports, and dreams of liberation. He can be found on Twitter @kevinfoxjr.