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The High Arrow

Indiana Area Senior High School

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Morbius: a complete failure?

By YANIS DJEKBOUBI

Morbius is Sony’s latest addition to their superhero movie adaptation catalog. After the enormous success they had with Spiderman: No Way Home (3rd most money grossing movie of all time), it would be logical to expect Morbius to follow on this trend. However, the movie took a completely different path.. and not a great one. But you may ask yourself : What went wrong, how did it fail, and is Morbius a complete failure?

Luckily for you, I have answered these questions for you here at the IHS High Arrow.

A good background. 

Morbius had everything to succeed. First of all, it’s produced by Sony, one of the biggest companies on the market but also, and mostly, those who gave us one of the biggest movies of all time : Spiderman No Way Home. Morbius also takes place in the Marvel universe (same as spiderman).. which is a great selling point. Moreover, the anti-hero movie is starring a famous cast with Jared Leto as the main character, Michal Keaton (already part of the MCU) and even Tyrese Gibson from the Fast and Furious franchise! This is without even talking about all the marketing done, and the millions of dollars put in the production. 

So, where did it miss?

Where it missed.

Even with all these benefits and advantages, Morbius did not succeed to implement itself as a must-see movie. Indeed, with a $75 million budget to make, the movie only grossed $100 million dollars worldwide. In comparison.  In comparison, Eternals (came out in november) cost $200 million dollars to make and grossed $400 million dollars worldwide. A question therefore is forced to be asked : Why? Well, there’s many reasons for such a poor score. First of all, the marketing. Even though Morbius had a somewhat big marketing campaign, it was just not that good. It was clear that Marvel and Sony were trying their best to sell it to people by saying for example : “the new marvel legend”. But, as we say, never judge a book by its cover. The true nature of the movie could only be analyzed when it came out on the big screen. And that’s what happened. The issues? A kind of poorly written story, terrible visual effects and a superhero origin story that feels forced as it can’t decide itself between humor and seriousness.

But what did IHS students ACTUALLY think about the movie? We asked them.

“I haven’t watched it, it didn’t look very appealing to me” says Avery Olenchick, a 12th grader.  “The story is not bad but the visual effects are disappointing” says Chris Norton, an 11th grader. “I’m not going to watch it” says Fiona Mcquaide, a 10th grader.

To conclude:

Morbius was a movie with a lot of potential that didn’t live up to these. It had undone visual effects and a story that was not appealing to many people. It still  managed to beat the $100 Million mark at the box office thanks to its studios and actors, but it certainly will  not stay in history for its success.

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