“Let them talk about you, even if it’s bad” is a phrase that is said when one wants to pretend that they know about advertising, but it is not really true nor is it taught in faculties (at least today). Nobody wants their product to be talked about badly or your ad, let alone become a meme for its poor quality. However, someone at Sony thought that ‘Morbius’ was different, and that after weeks of memes the film it would become an absolute success if it were re-released. That someone screwed up.
It’s morbin time!
This weekend, Jared Leto uploaded a video to twitter making like I was reading the script for ‘Morbius 2: It’s morbin time’, fatally using not only the meme itself but also the music from ‘Curb your enthusiasm’. The Internet, with this attempt by Leto to save the junk, has left the meme for dead just the day that ‘Morbius’ was re-released in 1037 theaters. What perfect timing.
We already have the collection data that will add to the 163 million dollars that the film has raised around the world: $300,000, about 289 per theater throughout the weekend. To get an idea of the matter, is the second worst average of all movies which were screened in the United States last weekend. Sony tried to embrace the meme in its advertising campaign but it showed that the tweeters had been quite a lot smarter than them.
If nothing else, at least it is a very interesting marketing lesson in 2022: memes don’t translate into money, and having your movie lampooned all over the internet doesn’t mean that people want to watch it again for a fee on a huge screen: it’s enough to be able to edit it to make jokes at their expense. This does not, of course, prevent Sony keep rolling your machinery to convince us that the Spider-Man Villains Universe is a real thing that undoubtedly exists. Next stops: ‘Kraven the Hunter’, ‘Madame Web’ and… ‘The Dead Man’. It’s dead time.
