Morbius: Move to October Places Sony’s Spider-Man Spinoff Between Dune and Halloween Kills

Sony Pictures on Monday staked out an October 8th release date for Morbius, placing the Spider-Man spin-off in-between the star-studded Dune on October 1st and Blumhouse slasher Halloween Kills on October 15th. The already thrice-delayed Morbius, which stars Jared Leto as the living vampire in the MCU-adjacent Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters, was planned for July before abandoning 2020 entirely because of the coronavirus pandemic. In March, Sony moved Morbius to spring 2021 ahead of its other Spider-Man-less spin-off — Venom: Let There Be Carnage — but Tom Hardy’s anti-hero now swings into theaters first if he holds onto his June 25th release date.

Morbius ditches a superhero-heavy March: it was due to open in theaters on the same day that Marvel Studios premieres its anticipated new series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, on Disney+. The month also sees the release of the anticipated Zack Snyder’s Justice League on WarnerMedia’s HBO Max.

It’s there that the Denis Villeneuve-directed Dune may or may not have a day-and-date release as Warner Bros. and producers Legendary Pictures are mid-dispute on the studio’s plan to send 17 2021 movies — including Godzilla vs. Kong and The Suicide Squad — to streaming on the same day they release in theaters where possible.

Halloween Kills is director David Gordon Green’s sequel to 2018’s Blumhouse-produced Halloween franchise reboot, itself a 40-years-later sequel to the original 1978 film. Kills cut out a release date on October 16, 2020, before Universal Pictures chose to delay it until October 15th of this year.

All three films will now open in the month that would have seen the release of Warner Bros. and DC Films’ The Batman, which flew from June to October 2021 because of multiple delays caused by coronavirus production shutdowns. This past October, the reboot with director Matt Reeves and star Robert Pattinson was pushed out of 2021 entirely when it landed on March 4, 2022.

The October 8th release date taken by Morbius previously belonged to Uncharted, Sony’s video game adaptation with Spider-Man star Tom Holland. An earlier rescheduling moved Uncharted onto July 16th, taking the slot once reserved for Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man 3 when it swung to its current date of December 17, 2021.

Starring Jared Leto, Matt Smith, Adria Arjona, Al Madrigal, Tyrese Gibson, and Jared Harris, Sony Pictures’ Morbius is scheduled to open in theaters on October 8th.