Morbius can’t be contained. The Jared Leto-led vampire flick has been infecting various pockets of the internet all this week, spreading from Discord to Twitch to Twitter. Now, with a rabid new audience who call themselves “Morbheads,” excited by 24/7 broadcasts of the Marvel film from rogue Twitch streamers, the fandom has reached its logical conclusion: memes. So many Morbius memes, everywhere. You can’t escape them.
A collaboration between Columbia Pictures, Marvel, and Sony Pictures Releasing, Morbius is about a human biologist looking for a cure to his unknown, fatal disease, only to end up becoming a living vampire instead. It’s a silly premise, and one that didn’t garner much critical praise when you look at the reviews. Still, the inexplicable seriousness of the film, and Jared Leto’s obnoxious method acting, gave Morbius an air of irony, kinda like Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. And in similar fashion, Morbius seems like it’s slowly becoming a cult classic, as thousands of viewers flocked to repeated livestreams of it on Twitch—me being one of them.
Read More: Enjoyable Disaster Morbius Finds Thousands Of New Fans On Twitch, And I’m One Of Them
Thanks to the film’s proliferation on Twitch since at least May 24, a glut of Morbius memes have started infiltrating the internet. There’s Twitter user Rama_Firmansya’s hilarious “History of Morbius Meme” a timeline spanning 2016 to 2022 that charts our progression from “hugh mungus” to “amongus” to “morbius.” There are a variety of box art memes of Morbius as a Nintendo DS, Switch, and Wii game—a trilogy, if you will. Hell, I even spotted an entire Twitch channel named morbing_man that was only streaming Morbius memes before the company yeeted it into space. The memes are everywhere at this point, like a virus. Like a…morbius?
“It’s Morbin Time,” a comical variation of the Power Rangers’ iconic catchphrase, is the Morbius meme of the moment. Apparently first tweeted in November 2021 by photographer Rhi Daneel Olivaw, “It’s Morbin’ Time” has since gone on to appear in a variety of contexts, from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to fast-food chicken joint KFC trying to get in on it to folks wondering what it’d look like if Morbius said it with Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet. I mean, someone even put “It’s Morbin’ time” in fake subtitles. It’s deep. Still, my absolute favorite meme has to be the crappy Wii remote speaker that utters the infamous line after the Super Smash Bros. announcer introduces Doctor Michael Morbius:
Like, come on! You can’t get any better than that. The sheer amount of nonsense happening here—Who’s voicing Morbius? How’d they do it? What’s going on?—is so infectious I can’t help but laugh. It speaks to meme culture’s ability to crunch entertainment into one distilled comedic moment, and I love every bit of it. Maybe that makes me a Morbhead.
While Twitch continues to clap Morbius livestreams, the film effortlessly rises from its coffin and comes back with new streams time and time again. What can you say? Morb’s gonna Morb. That said, folks don’t seem too thrilled about any possibility of Marvel or Sony greenlighting a sequel.