Some movies just can’t quite seem to make it to the finish line. It was true of the likes of The New Mutants, which was filmed in mid-2017 and didn’t actually hit theaters until the pandemic-gripped era of summer 2020. And it’s been true as well of Sony/Marvel’s Morbius, albeit with rather less press coverage than the cavalcade of woes that always seemed to surround the former. Still, in at least one way Morbius has now surpassed New Mutants—it’s technically been delayed six different times at this point. Its most recent, this week, now pushes the film’s theatrical release date to April 1, 2022. No word yet on whether this is an early April Fool’s Day joke.
The initial Morbius release date of July 10, 2020 feels like it was in the dark ages at this point, and it’s kind of hard to believe that filming was completed in June of 2019, months before the world was even aware of the existence of COVID-19. Since then, the film has been delayed six times, occasionally by as little as a week and more often in increments of a few months at a time. At various times, it’s been scheduled for July of 2020, March of 2021, October of 2021, January of 2022 and now April of this year.
Not that the studio is likely all that concerned about the ultimate performance of Morbius, what with the insane amounts of money that Spider-Man: No Way Home managed to make at the box office even as the Omicron variant of the coronavirus was running rampant in the U.S. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve had a true Hollywood blockbuster, and Sony has to be assuming that the renewed interest in the Spider-Verse will benefit Morbius, given that the character was originally a Spider-Man villain. It remains to be seen exactly how much Spider-Universe content will make it into the final version of Morbius, but quite a bit of it has already seeped into trailers, including images of Spider-Man himself. This latest delay has the internet rumor mill buzzing, of course, as it theorizes that perhaps the film could be getting some more last-minute additions in the wake of No Way Home. Stranger things have happened.
In the meantime, you can watch the most recent trailer—which was supposed to be the “final” trailer, but now who knows—for Morbius below.