What Has 'Morbius' Release Date Been Delayed to and Why Has It Been Changed?

Morbius was set to be released on Friday, January 28 but it was announced on Tuesday, January 4 that the Sony film would be delayed until later in the year.

Jared Leto's first foray into the superhero realm sees him play Spider-Man villain Michael Morbius, a doctor with a rare blood disease that leads him to seek a cure, no matter the cost.

Unfortunately, his experiments lead him to turn into a vampire with a thirst for blood so strong that he can't stop himself from becoming the anti-hero of the piece.

Leto is joined in the cast by Adria Arjona, Matt Smith, Tyrese Gibson and Jared Harris, while Michael Keaton returns to the role of Vulture.

Here is everything you need to know about the delay.

When has Morbius' release date been delayed to?

Morbius was originally meant to be released on July 10, 2020, and it was then moved to July 31, before being reshuffled again to March 19, 2021.

That wasn't the end of the changes made to Morbius' release date as it was then delayed to October 8, 2021, before being moved to January 28.

However, it has now been confirmed that the film has been delayed once more to the new date of April 1, The Hollywood Reporter reported.

Why has Morbius' release date been delayed?

Morbius is on the move once more as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the decision was made to change the date following a surge in cases of people with the Omicron variant.

The United States has seen a significant rise in those testing positive with the virus, with over 1 million new cases reported on Monday, January 3 according to data tracked by Johns Hopkins University.

It is a new global record for daily cases as, according to Bloomberg, the highest daily case count outside the U.S. before that was on May 7, 2021, when 414,000 people were diagnosed with the Delta variant in India.

The figure is also nearly double the record of almost 590,000 daily cases in the U.S. on December 30, 2021.

Prior to this new data, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases expert, said the U.S. was experiencing a "vertical increase" of new cases, and also confirmed that hospitalizations had gone up.

While on ABC's This Week on Sunday, he said: "We are definitely in the middle of a very severe surge and uptick in cases. The acceleration of cases that we've seen is really unprecedented, gone well beyond anything we've seen before."

Given these numbers it is understandable, then, that Sony chose to delay Morbius' release to April.