Anyone to have sat through all 104 minutes of Morbius, which includes the two post-credits scenes that have already been dubbed among the worst of all-time, will have been able to gather for themselves that the first non-Venom installment in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe was hacked to pieces in the editing room.
Huge amounts of footage used in the marketing campaign dating back to the beginning of 2020 are nowhere to be found in the final cut, the style and tone jumps all over the place from scene-to-scene, with Tyrese’s bionic arm never being seen or mentioned having already gone down in Marvel folklore.
One of the biggest casualties appears to be Al Madrigal, who was reduced to painfully forced comic relief, contributing almost nothing to Morbius other than a succession of one-liners that didn’t land. Unsurprisingly, then, the actor and comedian confirmed to ComicBookMovie that his role was torn to shreds in post-production.
“First of all, Morbius: not as bad as everybody is making it out to be. Sure, it had problems and they diced it up quite a bit. I had some hilarious lines that were cut out of that movie. I was very funny. In London, when you shoot they do a halfway party exactly midway through the film and there’s a big blowout.
Editors came up to me. A gaggle of them came up and said, ‘Oh my God, we see everything you’re doing. All the subtle stuff. All of the jokes.’ I got to improvise through that freely. If they’d left in just 50% more of my stuff. I got butchered in that thing. I think that’s what they did. They just really…because of COVID, they just had so much time to mess with it. They really messed with it.”
Nobody’s going to disagree with Madrigal’s sentiments, because it can’t be argued that Morbius isn’t an incoherent, messy beast. It’s also one that’s become an unexpected cult favorite, with fans desperate to will a sequel into existence, which is a turn of events nobody saw coming.