Memes Got 'Morbius' Rereleased—But Executives Weren't in on the Joke

Morbius was a critically panned movie that performed at mediocre levels at the box office, finishing with $163,864,372 worldwide. That's not great for a comic book movie that was held for a few years thanks to the pandemic. But when Morbius trended on Twitter, executives thought they had left some money on the table. So they elected to put the movie back into theaters.

But they should have maybe read why it trended, because when it went back to theaters—no one followed it. 

Why Morbius rose from the dead

In the basements of a sub-Reddit, Morbius memes came to life with jokes pretending it was the best-reviewed movie of all time, and users creating puns with other popular movie titles.

It was all fun and games, but it showed how dangerous it is to be a movie that trends on Twitter without context. It also shows that executives who don't understand Twitter should have much shorter leashes at studios. 

So how bad was it? 

The rerelease of the movie was put in 1,000 theaters.

The money made? Around $85,000 on Friday alone, per The Numbers. That means theaters took in around $85 each. Even if we say tickets average around $10, that means less than nine people saw it per theater.

That's quite bad. 

The one thing I can't get past is why they thought it was a good idea to bring it back to theaters, especially with competition only getting thicker in the summer. And I also just do not understand how they could have ignored meme-culture or been thick enough to not understand people were making fun of a title—and not asking for more.

There's a chance they thought this was like Venom, a poorly reviewed movie that audiences genuinely swarmed to anyway. A so-bad-it's-good piece of entertainment. But the audiences never swarmed to Morbius on the first release, so it's not surprising the second sputtered to a halt. 

Let us know your thoughts (and best jokes) in the comments.