There’s so much untapped horror potential in super-monster movies

polygon.com:

At the end of the 1998 superhero movie Blade, Wesley Snipes’ daywalker turns down a chance to be cured of his vampirism, opting instead to keep his powers for his fight against the fully undead. In an alternate version of this scene that periodically resurfaces in online bootlegs, the movie unveils Blade’s next target. On a distant rooftop stands a figure clearly intended to be Morbius, the Living Vampire. (He has no lines and no closeups, so he’s played by Blade director Stephen Norrington.) The studio ultimately flinched on plans to include Morbius in Blade II, due to the rights issues around the character.

Twenty-four years after Morbius was unceremoniously cut from the first-ever hit movie based on a Marvel superhero, he’s re-emerged in a vastly altered cinematic landscape. 2022 isn’t like 1998: Today, one of the only remaining sure bets at the box office is a movie starring a Marvel Comics hero. Morbius’ box-office take has been solid, but it’s also been overshadowed by some of the most scathing Marvel-related superhero movie reviews since 2015’s Fantastic Four, and by the general ignominy of being part of Sony’s fire sale of Spider-Man-adjacent characters, rather than the ultra-popular MCU.

Morbius’ switch from villain to leading-role antihero feels like a demotion. Without Spider-Man, he’s just another misfit monster without enough teeth. This is both fair, in thatMorbius is pretty middling, and a shame, in that having some stray Marvel characters set up at another, non-Disney studio is an opportunity to diversify what superhero movies can do.

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Morbius, along with the more popular but still vaguely off-brand Venom movies, is one of the last vestiges of a time when the rights to Marvel properties were