Morbius VFX Boss Addresses Original Scrapped Ending and Reasons for Reshoots

The final fight in Sony and Marvel's Morbius saw Jared Leto's titular vampire squaring off with Matt Smith's Milo in an abandoned subway tunnel, utilizing his connection to bats to defeat his rival. Since the film's release, it was confirmed that this wasn't the original ending. If you recall, there were shots in many of the trailers of Tyrese Gibson and Al Madrigal's characters standing in Central Park with an entire police force around them, seemingly waiting for a showdown. That clash was initially intended to be the film's finale, but it was scrapped in favor of an underground battle that had to be filmed during reshoots.

Following the debut of Morbius on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD, ComicBook.com spoke with Joel Behrens, the film's VFX supervisor for Digital Domain. He opened up a bit about the big alternate ending plans, at least from an effects perspective, and offered some insight into why the scene was changed in the first place.

"We had done some work on [the original scene], but not an extensive amount, because there were rumblings that they were thinking about changing the ending. So we had done some dev work and I wouldn't say a lot of shot work on it. But we had done a little bit of dev work because it was supposed to be initially Central Park, in that field area that you saw," Behrens explained. "And they just decided that they wanted to go a different direction with the fight, I think [Daniel Espinosa] thought it was a bit more dramatic underground. So we had found these pictures of some of these under construction, subway tunnels that actually exist in New York. And some that have just been sitting there and never finished. And there was these just gigantic caverns with these four tunnels done at the end that each could fit the size of a subway through them. So we saw some of these pictures and Daniel really liked the idea of them sort of just punching down through the ground as they fight on this construction building. And finishing the fight where he can take advantage of gathering up all these bats and defeat Milo in a more dramatic sort of fashion than we had in the outdoors."

Behrens added that the filmmakers didn't only move the scene underground to change the lighting. There was also a notion that the fight between Morbius and Milo needed to be a more intimate, one-on-one affair.

"I think they just felt it was better to have a kind of one-on-one state amongst a more interesting environment than sort of a park," he said. "It threw a bit of a wrench in us because then we had to build this fully CG environment, all of a sudden, which we went and we did reshoots. They built, I don't know, maybe a 20 by 20 foot area of the floor with some of the rubble on it and debris. And then the rest was all blue screen. So we had to build pretty much the entire environment from scratch on that one."

What did you think of the final ending for Morbius? Let us know in the comments!