Oh, how funny! What an unexpected turn of events! Jared Leto, the eponymous “living vampire” of the last “We have the right to make films about Spider Man which do not contain spider-men” image Morbiushas now put its personal mark of approval on the internet’s beloved “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme!
That’s right, folks: the meme culture that surrounds Morbius has now officially hit the “Wendy doing her own joke” Sir, it’s a Wendy’s joke” inflection point, as Leto posted a video of himself last night with a fake script for Morbius 2 subtitle It’s Morbin’s time. It happens just like Sony makes a weird little effort to put Morbius back in theaters this weekendgoing from less than a hundred screens over Memorial Day weekend to a number that would have been over 1,000.
All of this, in turn, has apparently been propelled by the internet’s adoption of Morbius as the last thing that we ironically hyper-fixed ourselves with, and which followed the same curve that all internet obsessions tend to follow these days: early amused irony spawns a culture of people doing Morbius jokes as a way to show connection with each other, which creates societies noticing that there is money in them on the Internet, who spawns a video of Jared Leto demonstrating he’s “in” on the joke. According to the standard, ano real connection with Morbiusthe pretty boring superhero vampire movie, wiped it all out about three permutations ago.
And that, of course, is kind of the point of meme culture, as far as we can tell: it reduces the whole comedy concept down to a set of simple LEGO-esque building blocks that are so easy to use that… Well, we were going to say “even Jared Leto can successfully use them”, but that seems a bit too mean, so we’ll leave it the phrase drags instead.
It’s now clear, anyway, that Sony is carrying out some sort of bizarre experiment here with all this “Bring Morbius plans to return to cinemas: choose a fairly weak box office weekend, slipping between the debut of Top Gun: Maverick Last week and the American debut of Jurassic World: Dominion next week— and figure out exactly how many $8 million “Morbin’ Time” memes actually translate to. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t cross our fingers for “None, please, for God’s sake, no money for meme movies, Christ.“BBut we’ll have to see what the box office reports contain next week to be sure.