Morbius Director Admits He Wasn't a Good Fit for Marvel Flop

Morbius director Daniel Espinosa expresses his regrets about making the Spider-Man spinoff.

By Kofi Outlaw

Morbius director Daniel Espinosa agrees with most of the moviegoing public that he wasn't the best person for the job when it came to directing Sony's Spider-Man spinoff film, Morbius. Of course, as you can read for yourself below, there's sort of a backhanded dig in Espinosa's breakdown of why he wasn't a good director for Morbius: namely because of some implied interference from the studio and the producers serving it: 

"To make a movie through committee, I think, is very hard, and I felt in the end that maybe a different director would have been a better fit," Espinosa told Deadline when asked if he took Morbius' underperformance personally. 

In full context, the quote was part of a discussion Daniel Espinosa was having about returning to Europe(he is a mix of Swedish and Chilean heritage), and why he's currently doing filmmaking outside the American Hollywood system. During his time in Hollywood Espinosa only had modest hits – like the Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds action-thriller Safe House, or cult-hit sci-fi-horror film Life – while Morbius got him a Golden Rasberry Awards nomination for "Worst Director" in 2022. For a filmmaker who started in Sweden making hits like Joel Kinnaman's crime-thriller Snabba Cash ("Easy Money", it was quite a career downturn. 

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"I spent 12 years in America … and it slowly got apparent to me that what I was doing made me slowly drift away from the reason I actually started making pictures, Espinosa explained. "So I really had a necessity somehow to get back to why I do movies at all."

Morbius earned $167.5 million on a reported budget of $75-80 million, making it a non-starter as a potential franchise for star Jared Leto. More importantly, Morbious was a massive misstep on Sony selling Marvel fans on the idea of a larger Spider-Man movie universe, going so far as to inexplicably bring together Leto's Morbius and Michael Keaton's Vulture from Marvel Studios' Spider-Man: Homecoming, in a universe (read: studio franchise) swap that is still unexplained. The next Spider-Man spinoff film Madame Web also flopped ($100 million in theaters on a budget of $80-100 million), making the entire Sony Spider-Man Universe franchise look dead in the water. 

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Best of luck to Kraven the Hunter director J.C. Chandor, who will drop his entry in the SSU late this year (with a budget of $100-$130 million). 

Morbius is now streaming. 

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