Welp, Morbius came out. Is it a good movie? No. Was it worth all the years of delays? Also no. But did it at least deliver on its promise that Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) would play a significant part in the plot and make the movie a mind-bending mashup of all of Sony’s Spider-Man universes? Definitely not.
***Spoilers for Morbius ahead***
Luckily, we’re here to walk you through the post-credit scenes where Toomes does appear, so that you don’t have to spend any money on a ticket!
First a quick rundown on what exactly happens in Morbius. Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) has a rare and incurable blood disease. So does his best friend Lucien (Matt Smith). Morbius grows up to be a scientist so that he can find a cure, and discovers that splicing his DNA with vampire bat DNA might be the answer. It does turn out to be the answer … to the question, how do you make someone into a vampire using science?? Lucien also figures out the vampire bat thing, and the two of them go around being vampires. Lucien loves it, but Morbius has mixed feelings. Anyway, vampire vampire, yadda yadda, until finally Morbius and Lucien have a big climactic fight and the movie ends.
Now, you might remember that the trailers for Morbius each held a surprising easter egg. Both of them show Adrian Toomes, AKA Vulture, catching Morbius’s attention and telling him they should stay in touch. Michael Keaton’s Vulture made his debut, of course, in Spider-Man: Homecoming. In Homecoming, Toomes starts off as a contractor working to clean up the mess left by the Chitauri invasion in The Avengers. As Toomes and his crew pick up pieces of alien technology, a bunch of government officials tell them to scram, and Toomes begins to sell Chitauri weapons on the black market to earn a living. While he’s at it, he makes his Vulture suit, which allows him to fly until Spider-Man puts an end to his operation and lands him in prison.
With Spider-Man: Homecoming being a great movie, and the trailer for Morbius not making it look like a very good movie, it looked like the presence of Vulture would liven things up a little (no pun intended). There wasn’t just the multiverse aspect. There was Michael Keaton’s charisma, and the fact that Vulture is such a cool, relatable villain. But alas, he didn’t show up once during the actual movie, leaving Matt Smith to fulfill the movie’s charisma quota all by himself.
The Post-Credit Scenes
I’m beginning to wonder if Sony just …doesn’t quite get the point of post-credit scenes. They’re supposed to be surprising and unexpected! If your post-credit scenes are so crucial that you’re showing them in multiple trailers, then why aren’t they just part of the actual movie!?
Not that Sony never gets it right. The post-credit scene in Venom: Let There Be Carnage, in which Eddie Brock finds himself transported to Tom Holland’s Spideyverse, was a great treat for fans. It’s clear that that’s what Sony is going for in Morbius‘s stingers, too, but it just falls flat.
Anyway. In the mid-credit scene, Adrian falls prey to one of the spells cast by Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home. As Strange is creating the multiversal rift offscreen, Adrian is transported into a prison cell in Morbius’s universe. In the post-credit scene, Adrian is released from prison, since in this universe he didn’t commit any crimes, and luckily the justice system isn’t so broken that you can be kept in prison just because you magically appeared there. (In the real world, that would absolutely happen, but that’s a whole other rant.) As he’s leaving, somehow reunited with his Vulture suit, he catches sight of Morbius. He tells Morbius that Spider-Man is likely responsible for the multiverse weirdness, and that he and Morbius should get together to “do some good”—i.e., terrorize Spider-Man. Morbius replies with, “Intriguing.”
It’s clear that Sony is building up to some kind of Sinister Six team-up. First we got Eddie Brock good and mad at Spidey for temporarily trapping him in the Avengers universe. Now we’ve got Vulture and Morbius in cahoots. Next up is Kraven the Hunter, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t care.
Anyway, you wanted the scoop on the post-credit scenes, so there you have it. Vulture exists. That’s it. That’s the big reveal. Don’t say we never did anything for you.
(image: Sony)
