Oh, how droll! Jared Leto is now participating in your “Morbin’ Time” memes
The "living vampire" actor posted a video of himself holding a fake script referencing the internet's latest new ironic obsession
Aux News Jared Leto
Oh, how droll! What an unexpected turn of events! Jared Leto, the eponymous “living vampyr” from Sony’s latest “We have the rights to make movies about Spider-Man that do not contain any spidered men” picture Morbius, has now put his personal stamp of approval on the internet’s beloved “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme!
That’s right, folks: The meme culture surrounding Morbius has now officially hit the “Wendy’s making its own ‘Sir this is a Wendy’s’ joke” inflection point, as Leto posted a video of himself yesterday evening with a fake script for Morbius 2 subtitled It’s Morbin’ Time. This arrives just as Sony makes a weird little push to put Morbius back in theaters this weekend, jumping from less than a hundred screens over Memorial Day Weekend back up to a number that’s been reported to be more than 1,000.
All of this, in turn, has apparently been propelled by the internet’s adoption of Morbius as the latest thing to get ironically hyper-fixated on, and which has followed the same curve that all internet obsessions tend to these days: Early amused irony begets a culture of people making Morbius jokes as a way to show connection with each other, which begets corporations noticing there’s money in them thar internets, which begets a video of Jared Leto demonstrating that he’s “in” on the joke. As per the norm, any actual connection to Morbius, the fairly dull superhero vampire movie, sloughed off the whole thing about three permutations back.
And that, of course, is sort of the whole point of meme culture, as far as we can tell: It reduces the entire concept of comedy down to a set of simple LEGO-esque building blocks that are so easy to use that… Well, we were going to say “that even Jared Leto can successfully employ them,” but that seems a little too mean, so we’ll just let that sentence trail off instead.
It’s now clear, in any case, that Sony is running some sort of bizarre experiment here with this whole “Bring Morbius back to theaters” project: Pick a fairly weak box office weekend—sliding in between the debuts of Top Gun: Maverick last week and the U.S. debut of Jurassic World: Dominion next week—and figure out exactly how many dollars 8 million “Morbin’ Time” memes actually translate into. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t have our fingers crossed for “None, please, for the love of god, no money for meme movies, Christ.” But we’ll have to see what the box office reports hold next week to know for sure.
39 Comments
The monster is under its own power now. All we can do is to watch it begin its path of destruction and deeply regret that we were the ones who started it up.
Internet internet Internet internet internet internet Internet internet.
When do we get to stop giving a shit what dumb 14-year-old boys have to say?
when do we stop giving a shit what pete worst has to say?
Right now, dummy. Go do your homework.
Is it dumb that I knew what you were referring to by capitalization alone?
Buffalo?
Yup.
Shi?
Mushroom mushroom
wow what a shock that he’s part of the advertising campaign
Keep it up folks. Then be sure to turn around and cry about superhero movies choking indie voices out of movie theaters.
Just be sure the crying about superheroes is done as a meme, otherwise, no one will care.
Considering the re-release has absolutely bombed so far I’m pretty sure you can’t claim Morbius memes have translated into people actually caring about Morbius as a film.
Well, that certainly kills the joke for me. The idea of Jared Leto being “in on the joke” makes my skin crawl.
Yeah, who does Leto think he is, some kind of joker?
And what a funny one!
FUCK! That was like the best joke ever and he ruined it!!
I consider myself extremely fortunate never to have seen a film where this guy plays a lead role. I don’t like bad emotional stuntmen.
There has always been something weird about this guy’s posture – at least in photos. Something about that anterior pelvic tilt. Can’t describe why it’s so off-putting. I expect actors to have more command of their “instruments” (bodies).
He stands like a 60 year old white woman (and often dresses like one too).
In the end it was not, in fact, Morbin’ Time
Unfortunately he decided to participate in the memes by graphically Morbbing all over some nearby cast and crew.
The central joke of the meme is that Morbius is a bad movie that no one gives a fuck about, so it’s funny to pretend that it’s good movie that people care about.So it’s very funny to me that the execs thought that millions of posts dunking on the shitty movie would translate into people paying money to go and see it.
I just binge-watched Succession and it reminds me of something in the third season, where Willa’s play is so roundly despised that Connor suggests they lean into it and try to use the bad press to get people to go and hate-watch it and get a profit that way. (Sorry for the minor spoilers for those that haven’t watched Succession, but this isn’t even a D-plot; it’s just background fodder so I figured it was safe to spoil.)
You’re familiar with Amy Pascal right? Those are the types of people running Sony Pictures. They’re all morons.
That’s Academy Award winner Jared Leto, to you!
Yeah, you’ll see ! You haven’t heard the last of me!
This is the first time I’ve heard such a thing. Was this started by 4chan or something?I scrolled down a bunch of the Twitter posts and I still don’t get it.Memes are like LotR’s Sean Bean “One does not simply….” or the Simpsons “Stop it! He’s already dead!” Things that are easily relatable, even without the context if you hadn’t seen the source.
This Morbin thing aren’t memes. They’re shitposts.
People have been referring to themed shitposts as “memes” for like 10 years dude. (BTW “stop, he’s already dead” isn’t a meme either, since it doesn’t mutate or evolve.)
by that logic, “Shut up and take my money!” isn’t a meme, either.They don’t evolve because they’re perfect memes, again, easily relatable and applicable to many conversations.The Morbin so-called ‘meme’ doesn’t work out of context and considering the abysmal box office performance, a large majority haven’t seen it.
Correct, it’s not a meme. It’s a catchphrase. Or a punchline perhaps. We did have words for these things before the internet.
A meme just has to reproduce (or in other words be copied/repeated) to be a meme.
When did we stop saying ‘image macros’?
I think it was only on Reddit that people *ever* said that
Why bother it’s just going to be on streaming shortly. Even a hit like The Batman came to HBO Max very quickly.
i was expecting a boring Paul W. S. Anderson-style film but Morbius was entertaining in a mid2000’s action film-kind of way.
Whats truly sad is Leto probably thinks this means we love him and his acting ability.