One aspect of Morbius that’s dominated discussion since the first trailer is how the movie would deal with Spider-Man. One of the more interesting wrinkles of the new Spidey agreement is that Sony’s universe and the MCU will become more intertwined. This may see Venom retroactively become an MCU movie, and will probably eventually see Tom Holland’s Spider-Man throwing down with the symbiotes.
Morbius seems set to be a trailblazer for the new era, having already showed off a small visual cameo from Spidey, Michael Keaton returning as Vulture and J.K. Simmons playing J. Jonah Jameson. But the Spider-Man cameo had fans scratching their heads in confusion.
You see, in the trailer we saw Morbius emerging from an alleyway that has a Spider-Man poster on the wall with ‘MURDERER’ scrawled across it. Given that Spider-Man: Far From Home ended with the hero’s identity being revealed and Peter Parker framed for the murder of Mysterio, this would make sense. But closer inspection revealed that something wasn’t right.
That’s because, for some reason, Morbius’ set design team used a picture of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man suit from the Sam Raimi movies. Not just that, but the exact image was identified as a promotional shot/in-game loading screen for the Raimi costume DLC from the PlayStation 4 Marvel’s Spider-Man game.
This immediately generated some wild theories, but a plot leak indicates that they’re going to fix this in the final movie. A post on Reddit claims to spell out Morbius‘ plot in detail and the moderators explain that the user has provided information that indicates he’s telling the truth. At the end of their summary, the leaker says that the shot of the Spider-Man poster has been reworked to resemble the Spider-Man: Homecoming costume and that the final shot of the movie is Morbius sitting on a billboard showing a wanted poster for Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, confirming it takes place in the MCU.
With Kevin Feige apparently not particularly happy about the two universes connecting, it remains to be seen what the full extent of this overlap will be. However, if it means we’ll get to see more of Holland’s Spider-Man, I’m certainly not going to complain.