April 1, 2022:
Morbius has two credits scenes, one for every year that the movie was delayed! And those two scenes are completely bonkers and arguably more important — for better and worse — than the movie itself.
The two scenes are mid-credits scenes — one starts when the movie ends and the other shortly after. Both scenes are connected and sequential.
Morbius’s first credits scene features the purple time rift seen in Spider-Man: No Way Home. In that movie, Doctor Strange has to put the world back together to stop the multiverse from collapsing on itself. The violet cracks in the sky symbolize the multiverse breaking, and with this credits scene, the implication is that Morbius (Jared Leto) and his world (which includes Venom and Carnage) are one of the parallel dimensions that is threatening to bleed into Strange’s and the larger Marvel cinematic universe (MCU).
Instead of Morbius or any of his ilk being transported into that timeline, a visitor from Strange’s comes through to Morbius’s. It’s Adrian Toomes (played by Michael Keaton) a.k.a. the Vulture, the villain from Spider-Man: Homecoming. He appears in a jail cell, transported from his own dimension where he’s serving a sentence for, among several crimes, hijacking Tony Stark’s plane. But since Toomes hasn’t been convicted of any crimes in Morbius’s world, we see him exonerated and freed.
The second scene picks up where the first one leaves off, and features Morbius meeting up with a free Toomes. The Vulture wants to recruit our living vampire into some kind of supervillain posse. Morbius doesn’t answer either way before the scene cuts to black. I’m not fully convinced Morbius will join him since his own movie positions him to be more anti-hero than supervillain.
Morbius’s credits scenes, especially considered alongside the ones attached to the ends of Spider-Man: No Way Home and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, tease out the possibility of these heroes and villains all eventually colliding with one another, with the ultimate fandom scenario being any of these characters linking up with Spider-Man (Tom Holland). And for a brief moment at the end of No Way Home it looked as though Tom Hardy’s Venom would finally come face to face with Holland’s Spidey, before the film walked it back, blinking Venom out of the MCU as easily as a snap.
All this universe-colliding stuff is a big deal because it’s how Marvel and Sony have addressed the film rights of various characters. Sony owns the film rights to Spider-Man and the characters in the Spider-Verse, but has, since Spider-Man: Homecoming, worked in collaboration with Marvel to let Holland’s Peter Parker join the MCU. Meanwhile, Sony has independently worked on movies like Venom, Venom’s sequel, and now Morbius. And fans are waiting to see if and when those Sony characters get to tangle with Spider-Man and possibly other Marvel characters.
That previous tease and letdown is perhaps why I’m just a little skeptical about Toomes’s sticking around with Morbius. Getting hopes up about Keaton’s Vulture and Leto’s Morbius teaming up or clashing with one another might be a little premature since it could all be undone with another credits scene. Yet with this bombshell cameo (which was teased in one of its trailers), it can’t help but feel a little like the credits scene and potential sequel are more important than anything that just happened in Morbius.
We could get our answer about Morbius, Vulture, and their future together soon enough. We’ll know for sure if a Morbius sequel is announced, but might hear more even sooner if we stick around for the next credits scene concerning one of Spider-Man’s pals.