Oh, how droll! What an unexpected turn of events! Jared Leto, the eponymous “living vampyr” from Sony’s latest “We have the rights to make movies about Spider-Man that do not contain any spidered men” picture Morbius, has now put his personal stamp of approval on the internet’s beloved “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme!
That’s right, folks: The meme culture surrounding Morbius has now officially hit the “Wendy’s making its own ‘Sir this is a Wendy’s’ joke” inflection point, as Leto posted a video of himself yesterday evening with a fake script for Morbius 2 subtitled It’s Morbin’ Time. This arrives just as Sony makes a weird little push to put Morbius back in theaters this weekend, jumping from less than a hundred screens over Memorial Day Weekend back up to a number that’s been reported to be more than 1,000.
All of this, in turn, has apparently been propelled by the internet’s adoption of Morbius as the latest thing to get ironically hyper-fixated on, and which has followed the same curve that all internet obsessions tend to these days: Early amused irony begets a culture of people making Morbius jokes as a way to show connection with each other, which begets corporations noticing there’s money in them thar internets, which begets a video of Jared Leto demonstrating that he’s “in” on the joke. As per the norm, any actual connection to Morbius, the fairly dull superhero vampire movie, sloughed off the whole thing about three permutations back.
And that, of course, is sort of the whole point of meme culture, as far as we can tell: It reduces the entire concept of comedy down to a set of simple LEGO-esque building blocks that are so easy to use that… Well, we were going to say “that even Jared Leto can successfully employ them,” but that seems a little too mean, so we’ll just let that sentence trail off instead.
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It’s now clear, in any case, that Sony is running some sort of bizarre experiment here with this whole “Bring Morbius back to theaters” project: Pick a fairly weak box office weekend—sliding in between the debuts of Top Gun: Maverick last week and the U.S. debut of Jurassic World: Dominion next week—and figure out exactly how many dollars 8 million “Morbin’ Time” memes actually translate into. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t have our fingers crossed for “None, please, for the love of god, no money for meme movies, Christ.” But we’ll have to see what the box office reports hold next week to know for sure.