Are Morbius and Venom Part of the MCU?

WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME

Hey everyone! I know it’s been a while since I did a Marvel post, but I think this should be talked about. Are Venom and Morbius connected to the MCU? Well first, go watch the trailer for Morbius. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, and I think Jared Leto is redeeming himself after Suicide Squad. Once you’ve seen the trailer, keep reading.

So, as you probably know, Spider-Man and all of his respective characters are property of Sony. That includes Venom and Morbius, as they are both enemies of the wall-crawler. In 2015 Sony and Disney made a deal that allowed for Spidey and related characters to appear in the MCU, with Sony being involved in the process and also getting a lot of the money for it. In 2019 there was that whole issue with Sony taking their characters back, and then a new deal being made, and all that stuff. Now, on the side Sony is developing their own movies. You had Venom, which was a pretty decent movie, but should have been R-Rated imo. Then Into the Spider-Verse, which was also pretty good. Now we’ve got Morbius, about a guy who becomes a vampire. I love this character so much, and Jared Leto is the perfect guy to play him I think. But two things happened in the trailer that make us wonder, can there be connections to the main MCU?

First off, there’s one part of the trailer (Time stamp is 2:09), where Morbius is walking down an alley. On the wall of a building you can see graffiti that happens to be a picture of Spider-Man with the word “Murderer” written on it. Now, if you’ve seen Far From Home, this will ring a bell. At the end of the film, Mysterio sets up Spider-Man to be a murderer, and also reveals his identity. We know pretty much nothing about Spider-Man 3 at this point, but it’s safe to assume that Peter Parker will either be on the run or in hiding due to Mysterio’s acts. It’d make sense for that graffiti to be there, as well as other Anti-Spidey propaganda. But there’s one problem with this: the Spidey in the graffiti isn’t Tom Holland’s version, it’s Tobey Maguire’s. Yep, so that seems to point just as much to Morbius being connected to the Maguire films as to the MCU. We’ll have to see what happens, but at the moment it isn’t a clear connection to the MCU.

The other thing worthy of mention, is that Michael Keaton appears at the end of the trailer (2:39). Any fans of Spider-Man know that Keaton played Vulture, the villain of Spider-Man: Homecoming. At the end of that film he had been taken to prison, where he met Scorpion. Now in this trailer, Keaton is wearing the same clothes that Vulture wore while in prison. Does that mean that he’s the Vulture in this movie too, and thus provides a bridge to the MCU? Possibly. It hasn’t been confirmed what role Keaton’s playing in Morbius, but Vulture could be setting up something like the Sinister Six. 

So, is Morbius in the MCU? We really can’t tell at this point. However, if it does play out that way (And that would make Venom MCU Canon too), then Spider-Man 3 and Venom 2 could play out very interestingly. We’ll just have to wait and see.