There's a lot of confusion surrounding Morbius right now. Rumour has it that all the Spider-Man references seen in the trailers have been cut, while reshoots are believed to have made some significant changes to Michael Keaton's scenes as Adrian Toomes. That's probably down to the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home, though nothing has been confirmed just yet.
With only a couple of days before Sony Pictures' latest Marvel Comics adaptation arrives in theaters, director Daniel Espinosa has been doing the rounds to promote the Living Vampire's big screen debut. Talking to ComicBook.com, the filmmaker revealed whether Spider-Man: No Way Home was partly to blame for the decision to delay Morbius (it was once set to be released before that threequel).
"Yes and no," Espinosa admitted. "You know, because the idea of the kind of parallel universes was really introduced, not into the kind of Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it was introduced within the, within cinema, if you'd call it in Spider-Verse, which was released by Sony and, produced by Avi Arad, who also produced Morbius."
We're not sure Avi Arad of all people deserves credit for that! Regardless, the director would go on to suggest that while the idea of multiple realities existed before Spider-Man: No Way Home, what we saw in that movie did end up influencing "visual elements" that have made it into Morbius.
"The concept of starting to work with parallel kind of verses was something that existed prior to the Spider-Man movie. And it's also been something that has existed for years in comic books. You know, us who read comic books, we knew about it, for like 15 or 20 years, as soon as the kind of clone era died with Spider-Man, the verses took a hold. But when Spider-Man came, there [was] certain kind of visual elements of how those kinds of transitions looked like that were informative."
Could this mean we're actually going to see The Vulture's arrival in the Venom-verse? It certainly sounds like something along those lines could be planned, though the director could just as easily be referring to something that ties this world more directly to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Morbius arrives in the UK on March 31 and hits U.S. theaters the next day.