If you've seen Morbius, we're sure you're aware that almost all the shots in the trailers featuring Michael Keaton's Adrian Toomes were missing from the movie itself. Based on comments made by the actor, it's blatantly obvious that all but one of the scenes we do see - when he's being led out of prison - were the product of reshoots caused by the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Well, that and the likelihood that Sony believed they would no longer be working with Marvel Studios and sharing Spider-Man when Morbius was being shot (making this movie the perfect place to connect Spidey's world with Sony's Marvel Universe through various references). We'd bet that Toomes was once just a non-Multiversal prisoner who tried to convince the Living Vampire to join him in his quest to take out Peter Parker, but the truth may never come to light.
Talking to Uproxx, Morbius director Daniel Espinosa has continued to dodge questions about those missing Vulture scenes. "The first thing that happened was that we had Michael Keaton because we were planning on doing this. But then when Spider-Man: No Way Home came out, it said, 'This is how the visual effects are," he explained. "And then the idea of having him just encountering him in that universe seemed too complicated, and then we put it in the end."
"The idea of having different timelines was something that was, for me, introduced within the movie universe with Into the Spider-Verse," he said when pushed to elaborate. "When we were talking about making the movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had just come out and it was a huge success. I told the guys, I said, 'This is super common among comic book readers.'"
As you'll see if you take a look at the original interview, nothing he says there addresses what the journalist was asking about Toomes' scenes being reshot. Espinosa would go on to insist that Sony created the Multiverse before Marvel Studios, and tried to make sense of The Vulture recruiting the heroic Living Vampire for his team by noting, "Vulture is not a criminal in that universe just yet."
"I think that’s more one of those scenes that are made that when you have scenes before that in a movie comes along, that will explain that reposition," he added when pushed on why Morbius would have any sort of interest in potentially taking aim at any world's Spider-Man.
When it was put to the filmmaker that Morbius doesn't really feel like a movie he would make and that the cut he turned in may not be the one that's been torn apart by critics, Espinosa issued a brief response. "These movies are big ideas. I think that I work at my best if I get a lot of decision power. But, in these movies, they’re big movies that have a lot of people’s interest."
If we're going to read between the lines, it's probably Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach who pushed for changes to be made that resulted in Morbius confounding and angering fans. After all, you need only look back at what they were cooking up for The Amazing Spider-Man franchise once upon a time...