The outcry for Morbius is one of the most curious events that have occurred on the internet in the last couple years. It started off as a generic bad movie that was destined to fail, and morphed into something that was being praised like it was the greatest thing in years. Here’s how.

Morbius is a superhero vampire movie with it’s main lead, Jared Leto. That’s the important part. The public perception for Jared Leto over the last few years has been especially bad, since his feature as the Joker in 2016’s ‘Suicide Squad’ was quite awful and his actors generally said his usage of method acting was nothing but a poor excuse to harass his coworkers on set, which led to even more people clowning on Morbius’ release. Method acting to him was the way to stay in character throughout the filming of the movie to embrace his character and display a better performance, but it’s nothing more than a gimmick. His decision to use method acting continued in the filming of Morbius, in which he would act like his character and refuse to get off his wheelchair the entire time. His coworkers had to push him to the bathroom for a while, until he got sick of the long wait and decided to just break character and just walk.

The meme began initially as a niche one. Jokes were about the movie sweeping the globe because of ‘how good’ it would be, with most memes accompanied with the hashtag #morbiussweep. The irony came from the fact that judging by the promotional material and no general interest about the film, was that it was going to flop. The film then released and was a disaster to no one’s surprise, which ended up feeding into the meme. Countless memes rose sarcastically joking about how everyone was going to see Morbius as it was the biggest thing to happen that month.

The peak of Morbius’ popularity arrived after it left theatres, with a new meme about Jared Leto saying ‘It’s Morbin’ time’ in the film. That line isn’t actually said in the movie, but everyone repeated it for a few weeks like it was, leading into an even funnier dynamic. With #morbius dominating the Twitter trending page for consecutive days, the most unexpected thing to happen actually happened: the officials noticed the movie ever growing in popularity and decided to bring it back to 1,000 theatres in the US for 1 week. The funniest part about this, was that the film bombed again. Sony didn’t realize that the meme was about how bad the movie was and that nobody went to see it, and instead believed it to be actual interest for watching the movie. Which was a classic example of the older higher ups just not understanding what the whole joke was about.

The meme officially died with one swift blow when Jared Leto himself posted a meme about the movie, explaining to everyone how he understood the joke. Unanimously, everyone decided to end the meme at that point because then it felt like Sony and Jared Leto were pretending to understand the meme to capitalize the popularity off of it. But even when the memes are dying out, the joke still continues. There are currently petitions that are going strong with signatures, to bring back Morbius to the theatres for a third time because everyone, ‘happened to be busy that weekend’. Truly one of the wildest internet occurrences over the last few years.