Sony has struggled with its movie releases since the coronavirus pandemic started. This includes its release dates for its upcoming Spider-Man movies.
Marvel delayed one movie in 2021, moving Black Widow from a May release to a July release, leaving the month of May as a “Marvel-Less May” for fans.
However, the rest of the Marvel lineup has stayed mostly the same, with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Eternals, and Spider-Man: No Way Home still lined up to finish the year strong for Marvel.
However, Sony has pushed one of its 2021 Marvel releases to later in the year and the second all the way to 2022.
That second one, Morbius, was just pushed back even further.
Sony delays Marvel’s Morbius
Morbius is a Spider-Man spinoff movie based on the character of Michael Morbius, a brilliant scientist who tried to cure a disease he suffered from but ended up turning himself into a Living Vampire instead.
Morbius used vampire bats, which caused his new affliction and the need to consume blood to survive.
The Morbius movie was set to come out in 2021, following Venom: There Will Be Carnage.
Venom was moved to September 17 and then moved again to September 24, allowing Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to have three weeks in theaters before hitting. This also gave it two weeks before the next James Bond movie hits on October 8.
Sony moved Morbius to January 21, 2022, but now it has pushed it back another week to January 28, 2022.
Why did Sony move Morbius again?
January is not a good time to release movies, and it usually is reserved for movies studios have no faith in or smaller horror movies. It might be that Sony sees Morbius as more of a comic book horror movie.
The latest Scream movie also hits on January 14, so much in the same way that Venom moved and gave it some separation from Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings, this move might have been the same for Scream.
It also isn’t a big surprise, as Sony has talked about making lots of moves since the theaters started reopening.
“What we won’t do is make the mistake of putting a very, very expensive $200 million movie out in the market unless we’re sure that theaters are open and operating at significant capacity,” Sony Pictures chief Tony Vinciquerra said during a conference last fall.
“You’ll see a lot of strange things happen over the next six months in how films are released, how they’re scheduled, how they’re marketed, but once we get back to normal, we will have learned a lot, I think, and found ways to do things that are somewhat different and hopefully better.”