CineMark has released the official runtime for the upcoming Marvel thriller film Morbius, produced in partnership with Sony. The film is set to be longer than its sister film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but shorter than Spider-Man: No Way Home, giving the film little time to introduce an all-new character and draw him into the larger Marvel universe.
The film, set to be released on January 28, 2022, clocks in at an hour and forty-eight minutes, according to CineMark. This run time makes the film almost twenty minutes longer than the Venom sequel, but almost an hour shorter than No Way Home, which clocked in at a whopping two hours and thirty minutes. That middling run time will be all that fans get to understand the story of Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto), who finds a cure for his rare blood disorder, at a cost to both himself and those he loves.
Morbius is a well known staple of Marvel comics, usually connected to Blade, the vampire hunter, as well as our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Whether Morbius will encounter a version of Spider-Man — or Venom, for that matter — is unknown, as audiences are unsure how the vampire film connects to either the MCU or Sony's other Spider-Man adjacent projects, though a version of The Daily Bugle, the fictional newspaper popularized in Spider-Man comics, has been spotted in several trailers.
The film has a lot to cover with a short run-time, since Morbius is not a particularly well-known character. However, the shorter runtime may allow the story to focus more on Morbius’s vampirism in particular, rather than feel that it needs to tread over the tired tropes of the monster in order to introduce the character to a wider audience. And despite the shorter runtime, the film will add horror to Marvel’s already expansive repertoire as they draw more and more supernatural aspects into the MCU, as well as the Sony universe of Marvel films.
Morbius premieres exclusively in theaters on January 28.