Morbius director thinks the living vampire could beat Doctor Strange

polygon.com:

Morbius, lead character of Morbius, is an odd supervillain from the jump: a tortured scientist who gave himself vampire-like abilities — and vampire-like hungers — and often needs a Marvel superhero to keep him in check. But there was one story that Morbius director Daniel Espinosa (Child 44) used to show executives why his movie Morbius was more than just Spider-Man’s weirdo frenemy:

That time Morbius nearly killed Doctor Strange.

“I love the moment where he sucks out the life energy of Doctor Strange,” Espinosa told Polygon over Zoom. He didn’t mention an issue number, but we think he was probably talking about 1993’s Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme #53, in which the villain Nightmare pits Dr. Michael Morbius and Dr. Stephen Strange against each other, and not in an operating theater.

“I just kept pounding that to all the executives, like, You don’t get it. This guy has been on the verge of beating Doctor Strange! This is not a nobody. And we don’t really know the ends of his powers. I wanted to express the thing of — in comic books, 15 years ago, it was introduced, the idea of the Spider Totem.”

In the early ’00s J. Michael Straczynski introduced a class of god-like characters to Spider-Man comics — the Spider Totems — who chose mortals throughout the multiverse to carry their essence. In short, they are the reason so many universes in the Marvel multiverse have some kind of Spider-Man (Or woman, or pig). In 2015, Dan Slott would pick up that idea and use it for the foundation of the multiverse-hopping Spider-Person team up event Spider-Verse, which eventually became the inspiration for 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

But the comics also implied that there might be other animal-themed Totem cabals, and