Sony has gotten a real “Joker” to play their latest Spider-Man villain!
The Wrap is reporting that Jared Leto has signed on to play Morbius for Sony. He will play the character in a stand-alone film directed by Safe House‘s Daniel Espinoza.
Morbius is Dr. Michael Morbius, a Nobel Prize winning biologist who was born with a rare, fatal blood disorder that cause his blood cells to deteriorate. He came up with a cure, but the cure gave him the curse of pseudo-vampirism , forcing him to drink human blood to keep his disease at bay. More a tragic figure or outright antihero than a villain, Spider-Man would often face off against Morbius to keep him from hurting other people at the same time he was trying to cure him.
Espinoza was briefly in the running to direct Suicide Squad 2, which also stars Leto as the Joker, but the job eventually went to Gavin O’Connor. For Leto, he joins the select club of actors who have brought characters from both Marvel and DC on the big screen.
This, added to the recent announcement that another Spider-Man spinoff, Silk, is in the works, shows that Sony is serious about mining the Spider-Man rights for all they got.
More on this as it develops.
