Rotten Tomatoes: 16% (117 reviews) with 3.8 in average rating

Critics consensus: Cursed with uninspired effects, rote performances, and a borderline nonsensical story, this Spidey-adjacent mess is a vein attempt to make Morbius happen.

Metacritic: 37/100 (45 critics)

As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie. It's structured like this: quote first, source second.

After a promising start, Daniel Espinosa’s long-delayed film only intermittently matches the intensity of the lead performance, and the script by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless becomes thin on story, stringing together chaotic outbursts and action clashes that build to a painstakingly foreshadowed “sibling” faceoff. None of that seems likely to deter the geek faithful, even if this new entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe often seems a lot like a boilerplate Venom installment, without the humor.

-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“Morbius” mostly surprises because of how very dull it is. Case in point: After Michael’s bad deeds become publicized, local news teams term him “the Vampire Murderer,” an uninspired nickname that serves as a microcosm of everything “Morbius” is: mostly unnecessary, oddly unoriginal, and soon quite forgettable indeed.

-Kate Erbland, IndieWire: C-

“Morbius” isn’t even a debacle. It’s a little over 90 minutes long if you don’t count the credits (which include what has to be the worst closing teaser I’ve ever seen in a Marvel movie), and for all the overwrought push of Jon Ekstrand’s score, the film is nothing more than a flimsy time-killer, an early-April placeholder of a movie. It’s as trashy and underimagined as the “Venom” films, though it’s easy to see why both of those became mega-hits: The character of Venom, who’s like a superhero merged with the creature from “Alien,” with a voice of basso showbiz effrontery, is an entertaining hunk of sci-fi demon eye candy. Whereas Leto’s teeth-baring monster-scientist truly looks like a relic from the ’70s. He never scares or dazzles or haunts you — not because Leto is less than a good actor, but because this isn’t a character based on acting. It’s based on the creakiest FX, the one (mild) exception being the painterly trails of digital “smoke” left behind by Morbius as he flies through the air.

-Owen Gleiberman, Variety

Morbius is unspectacular in ways that waste the potential of what could be an intriguing hybrid of sinister horror and superhero thrills. One single scene recalls David F. Sandberg’s Lights Out for a suitable fright, but otherwise horror accents are limited to cheesy jokes about Dracula. That’s the approach the whole film takes, in fact. Everything feels superfluous and uninterested in thoughtful storytelling because the mission at hand is to get to the end credits where the meat exists. Morbius is so focused on building Sony’s Spider-Man Universe and hopeful sequels — which could very well be better now that the foundation exists — that it forgets about enthusiastically engaging its audience from the start.

-Matt Donato, IGN: 5.0 "mediocre"

What starts as a fun mad-scientist saga ends up in the usual big battle, and the journey drags along the way.

-Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

It really is an amazingly pointless and dumb film: the good/bad setup between Morbius and Milo is muddled and cancelled by the not-especially-compelling moral struggle within Morbius himself. Both Leto and Smith have to keep doing the evil demonic face-change growling thing, and it is intensely silly. Let’s hope the extended Spider-Man universe extends far enough to include something more interesting than this.

-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 1/5

Most of the MCU movies and some of the recent DC films like “The Suicide Squad” are case studies on how to best introduce obscure superhero personas onto the screen. The gonzo “Venom” movies know and proudly own what they are. “Morbius” misses all those lessons and seems to be stuck among the more lackluster films from the early to mid 2000s a la “Elektra.” Even the mid-credits scenes that attempt to bring Leto’s role into a larger landscape wind up being more confusing than cool. Rather than a fang-tastic time, “Morbius” is just a soul-sucking effort.

-Brian Truitt, USA Today: 1.5/4

Beyond whatever scenes have been reworked, recut or just plain deleted from an abbreviated final cut, the movie shies away from the vampirism that could have made this more than a swift origin story: There’s surprisingly little blood in this sucker and, of course, eroticism is largely eschewed. The movie is most enticing when Dr. Michael Morbius feels like a threat to himself and/or others, and that feeling isn’t allowed to linger. It’s a perverse tactic, given that Sony transparently yearns for these villains to team up and take on some version, any version, of Spider-Man. The actual pre-credits body of Morbius doesn’t actually waste any time on this set-up. Yet there’s some kind of invisible force here, hurrying things along in the hopes of a future team-up, making sure this feature film arrives more undead than alive.

-Jesse Hassenger, Paste Magazine: 5.9/10

Without spoiling anything, a couple of post-credits sequences set up a future for Leto’s character in a larger world that you understand why Sony would try and telegraph, but given the failures of past Spider-Man spin-offs it’s hard to believe they have really thought any of those next steps through. But until then, Morbius feels like exactly the kind of second-tier superhero adventure audiences will accept in between ones that they actively want. Admittedly, it’s odd to want a movie like this to have been worse, but that would mean it failed as bigly as the swings it took; by comparison, Morbius is a walk, or at best a bunt. That may qualify it as a hit for Leto, Espinoza and Sony, but that doesn’t mean it’s much fun to watch from the stands.

-Todd Gilchrist, The A.V. Club: C-

“Morbius” is bad, yes, but it’s not even fun-bad, like the “Venom” movies; it’s just kind of depressing. There’s not a single thrilling, surprising, or entertaining moment in it, from start to finish, because comic book movies have reached a point of longevity and saturation that all of them are purely paint-by-number affairs: the laborious origin stories, the washed-out color palates, the bombastic scores, the daddy issues, the climactic barely-lit, CGI-heavy final fights to the death, and the mid-credit sequences to set up future installments. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s short.

-Jason Bailey, The Playlist: D-

It looks like “Morbius” might soon cross paths with Spider-Man in one universe or another, but that would be a big step up for him, because his introductory vehicle feels more like a just-average 1990s vampire movie.

-Richard Roeper, The Chicago Sun Times: 2/4

Is Morbius the worst Marvel movie ever made? In an alternate universe without The New Mutants, the answer would likely be yes. And with all these multiverses now colliding into each other, who knows: There may even be a world out there where things actually came together for this old-school comic-book bloodsucker onscreen, where his determination to fight his newly monstrous nature while taking on the corrupt and the criminal gave us a deeper, darker antihero and Leto the chance to make his mark in the larger Marvel ecosphere. We’re stuck in this timeline, where the Morbius we’ve got is, plain and simple, a mess. If it’s not the worst of these films, it’s certainly the most anemic — and even die-hard fans are apt to feel completely drained by all of it.

-David Fear, Rolling Stone

PLOT

Suffering from a rare blood disease, Dr. Michael Morbius tries a dangerous cure that afflicts him with a form of vampirism.

DIRECTOR

Daniel Espinosa

WRITERS

Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless

MUSIC

Jon Ekstrand

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Oliver Wood

BUDGET

$75 million

Release date:

April 1, 2022

STARRING

• Jared Leto as Dr. Michael Morbius

• Matt Smith as Milo

• Adria Arjona as Martine Bancroft

• Jared Harris as Nicholas Morbius

• Al Madrigal as FBI Agent Alberto "Al" Rodriguez

• Tyrese Gibson as FBI Agent Simon Stroud