Eddington director Ari Aster has revealed he was asked to make the Marvel flop Morbius.
The 2022 expected blockbuster, which starred Jared Leto and was eventually helmed by Life director Daniel Espinosa, was widely panned by critics and tanked at the box office.
In an interview with Semafor, Aster was asked about a rumor that he had been approached by Marvel to direct a film for the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe and responded: “Yes, once.”
Pushed to specify which film was discussed, the 39-year-old filmmaker struggled to remember the name of the film, saying: “I feel like I shouldn’t say… I was asked to do Mobius? Is it Mobius or Morbius?”
The film followed Leto as Dr Morbius, who is sick with a rare blood disorder and turns to a risky solution in order to save others from the same fate.
It has a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 15 percent, making it one of the lowest-rated Marvel films to date.
In an interview with Insider, Espinosa was asked whether or not he paid attention to negative feedback.
“Look, I have a lot of self-hatred so I have a lot of criticism of my own work. I’m always trying to focus on being better. But I am also proud of what I do,” Espinosa said.
“It’s a strange thing to make something that is so public,” he added. “There are parts in all of my movies that I’m really proud of.”
The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey was among many critics to give the film an unfavorable review, writing: “Somewhere in the middle of Morbius, a film about a Spider-Man villain that does not feature Spider-Man, I was ready to tap out. To get up and leave. To move to an alpine cottage in Switzerland and simply never engage with Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-Man Universe ever again. It’s too much effort, with too little reward…
“All in all, Morbius is a film that’s more frustrating than it is gleefully inept. And if superhero movies really are going to dominate modern cinema for the next decade or so, we should at least be allowed a little healthy competition between studios. I hope, in the future, Sony can put up a better fight than this.”
In addition to low ratings, its box office debut earned just $39.1 million (£24m) during its US opening weekend and $84 million (£64m) globally.
Comparatively, Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame (2019) made box office history with worldwide earnings of $2.7 billion (£2b).
