Morbius, the new vampire movie coming out on April 1, is one of those properties that exists in the weird, ever-shifting limbo between Marvel and the other companies that have rights to its properties. The latest Spider-Man trilogy is set in the MCU, even though it was made by Sony. Other movies, like all the X-Men films made by Fox, aren’t considered canon (although the newly formed multiverse has kind of blown that wide open). So what about Morbius? Is Morbius set in the MCU? Can we expect to see him interact with any MCU characters? Here’s what we know so far!
An Entanglement of Universes
Morbius started out, in the comics, as one of Spider-Man’s enemies, and the first Morbius trailer contains a bunch of Spider-Man references. The problem? All the references seem to be from different realities.
First, we see Morbius holding a copy of The Daily Bugle, the newspaper that reports on Spider-Man’s activities. This can’t be from the MCU, though, because in the MCU, The Daily Bugle is J. Jonah Jamison’s vlog-turned-cable news show, not a print newspaper. Could Morbius be in the universe of Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man? The Spider-Man poster Morbius passes a few seconds later, which has the word “murderer” scrawled across it, would suggest so, since that Spider-Man’s costume looks like Maguire’s.
But wait! A few seconds after that, we see a cop inspecting a crime scene. The cop says, “We haven’t seen anything this good since that thing in San Francisco.” Venom and Venom: Let There Be Carnage are both set in San Francisco, so that line seems to indicate that Morbius takes place in Venom’s universe, which is different than the Maguire-verse (remember that a different version of Venom infects Peter Parker in Spider-Man 3).
After that, we get the most confusing reference yet. We hear a voice say, “Hey, Doctor Mike.” The camera cuts to Michael Keaton, who played Adrian Toomes, AKA the Vulture, in Spider-Man: Homecoming. This would seem to place Morbius in Tom Holland’s universe, which is part of the MCU.
It’s clear that the first trailer is going out of its way to mess with our ideas of which universe Morbius takes place in, and the final trailer doesn’t clarify anything (although it does show us a little more Adrian, plus it paints a clearer portrait of Matt Smith as Loxias Crown, which is pretty cool).
So what’s going on here? The first possibility is that the movie is meant to more or less stand on its own, and Sony doesn’t want audiences pinning it squarely in one universe or another. Or, we could be seeing the MCU’s multiverse at work.
The MCU is No Longer a U
Remember that, thanks to Doctor Strange and Peter Parker’s antics in Spider-Man: No Way Home, the walls of the multiverse have crumbled. It is now 100% plausible, and not even that ridiculous to suggest, that Morbius may take place in a reality that’s a combination of all three Spider-Man universes. Maybe Morbius simply lives in a universe where Tobey Maguire’s Spidey fights Tom Hardy’s Venom while Michael Keaton’s Vulture looks on. Who knows? The Marvel Cinematic Universe is now officially a multiverse, so literally anything can happen.
But will Morbius ever interact with the characters in the MCU movies? Well, we do know there are vampires in the MCU…
We Know Vampires are Coming to the MCU
Marvel has been teasing the existence of vampires for a long time now. In Thor: Ragnarok, Korg muses that the giant wooden weapon he’s holding would be good for attacking “three vampires huddled together.” In Loki, Mobius mentions that the TVA has arrested vampires in the past.
The post-credits scene in Eternals brings us the closest we’ve come to vampires in the MCU yet. Dane Whitman, AKA Black Knight, is working up the courage to touch his family’s sword when a voice offscreen asks, “Are you sure you’re ready for that, Mr. Whitman?” The voice belongs to Blade (Mahershala Ali), the vampire hunter who will be making his MCU debut sometime in the next couple of years.
While we don’t know for sure if Blade and Morbius will ever meet up, it’s a very interesting coincidence that the living vampire and the vampire hunter both have movies coming out within a couple of years of each other. The two are strongly connected in the comics, with Blade having gotten his powers from a bite from Morbius in 1999’s Peter Parker: Spider-Man #8, so it wouldn’t at all be surprising if the two films are setting up a larger vampire presence in the MCU.
Will Morbius clarify things when it comes out on April 1? Or is the movie as deliberately confusing as the trailer? We’ll have to wait and see!
(image: Sony)
