No./15 Morbius
After two Venoms, what does Sony’s next antihero adventure bring to its burgeoning Spider-verse?
WHERE? Fountain Studios, Wembley WHEN? 15 May 2019
WHY? To witness Jared Leto’s arrival in a Marvel movie, as the conflicted anti-hero Michael Morbius: a genius physiologist suffering a rare blood disease who takes extreme steps to find a cure, and in the process turns himself into a kind of ‘living vampire’. “He’s a doctor on the one hand,” says producer Lucas Foster, “but he’s a monster on the other, and he’s trying to wrestle with these two sides: the impulse to save people and the impulse to prey on them.”
WHAT DID WE SEE? The former home of The X-factor and Britain’s Got Talent, radically transformed into the mouth of a cave in a South American cenote, with a helicopter parked just outside the dark, craggy entrance. There are animal skulls and bones strewn across the hose-slicked rocks, and a hi-tech “bat trap” positioned right at the cave’s edge.
WHAT WAS BEING FILMED? The movie’s opening scene, during which Morbius slashes his palm with a machete to help attract the vital ingredient for his wacky-science disease-killer: vampire bats. As Morbius, Leto looks fragile and wan, with long, lank hair and dark circles under his eyes. Wrapped in a black, rain-drenched poncho and hunched over a pair of walking sticks, he has the appearance of a bat himself (crawling, not flying), as he waxes lyrical about his bitey subjects. “The most efficient hunters in the world”, he explains in dialogue; they don’t smell your blood, but sense it via “microscopic thermo-receptors embedded in their brains” — no doubt giving us a clue to one of Morbius’ incoming superpowers. Interestingly, Leto stays in character the entire time, even hobbling around on those sticks between takes.
BEHIND THE CAMERA? Swedish director Daniel Espinosa, best known for gritty thrillers such as Safe House, Child 44 and Life, but it also turns out that he’s the “second-biggest purchaser of comic books in Sweden” (according to joking executive producer Louise Rosner). “As a teenager I read almost everything that Marvel published,” Espinosa tells Empire. “But I felt very close to this character, who was like the Kurt Cobain of Marvel characters, and just told people to fuck off. When the film came to me, it was almost too good to be true.” Especially as he has “an Academy-nominated actor” as his lead. Although, impressive as it was, Leto’s fully committed Method approach does have its drawbacks. “Sometimes with those crutches it takes a long time for him to come to set. But other than that, it’s great!”
WHAT CAN WE EXPECT? A full-on action movie (which at one point, we’re told, will involve a daring skyscraper-prison escape) that will also have a horror edge, as Leto’s bloodlusting Morbius undergoes a monstrous transformation. Interestingly, despite the green screen in evidence around the set, Espinosa says he’s avoiding CGI where possible, for example putting acrobatic performers on wires rather than creating digital doubles. “Asian cinema has been a big influence for me on this,” he says. “I’ve stepped into a new realm with this picture.” One that’s required a lot of blood, sweat and, well, more blood. DAN JOLIN MORBIUS IS IN CINEMAS FROM 28 JANUARY