“Morbius” Director Talks Film Backlash

Sony Pictures

Swedish-Chilean filmmaker Daniel Espinosa (“Safe House,” “Life”) is out talking up his new feature “Madame Luna” and the upcoming Netflix crime drama “The Helicopter Heist”.

During those press rounds, he spoke with Deadline and looked back on a film that has become infamous – Sony’s “Morbius” movie in 2022.

The film saw multiple delays and then opened to a critical panning, poor box-office and countless memes. Asked if he suffered from that experience by Deadline, Espinosa said:

“Yes. To make a movie through committee, I think, is very hard, and I felt in the end that maybe a different director would have been a better fit. I’m known amongst the studios to be a person with a lot of opinions, and maybe they were not looking for that kind of director.

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. There are parts in all of my movies that I’m really proud of.”

In the wake of the film’s flop, he turned to making Italian refugee tale “Madame Luna” because he wanted to “make a story about myself”. When the time came around to film it, he had an anxiety attack on set because the American studio system had been such a fight for him every day:

“I got a complete anxiety attack because you’re so used to the fight. The fight defines you, so I think the hard thing with the American industry is that the fight is almost a necessity, but it’s hard not to start patting yourself on the back that you’re fighting and forgetting what you’re fighting about.

I spent 12 years in America… and it slowly got apparent to me that what I was doing made me slowly drift away from the reason I actually started making pictures. So I really had a necessity somehow to get back to why I do movies at all.”

In the wake of those comments, Espinosa has received a bunch of support in comments on social media which convey the sentiment he’s being too hard on himself and the studio is the one to blame for the film’s failure.

“Morbius” earned $167.5 million on a reported budget of $75-80 million, still better numbers than this year’s Sony-Marvel film “Madame Web” which made $100 million from a budget of $80-100 million.

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