How Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse fixed Morbius post-credit scene

When Morbius premiered it confused audiences with its nonsensical post-credits scene. However, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse might have just fixed it.

When you think about great movies featuring Spider-Man characters, it’s likely that Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man: No Way Home, or the incredible Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse might come to mind. One project you might not think about, however, is Morbius.

Sony’s attempt at bringing the living vampire to the big screen was met with an underwhelming critical and commercial response. Worst of all, the movie became the source of multiple memes used all over the internet because of how bad it was. Even its post-credits scene made no sense at all, indicating how much of a mess everything turned out to be. When a movie isn’t coherent in its last moments, you know there’s nothing that can redeem it (aside maybe from an “It’s Morbin’ time” meme).

But why exactly was Morbius’ post-credits scene confusing? How come the movie was considered a failure, even in that regard?

Morbius post-credits scene

Let’s do a brief recapitulation. Both Venom and Morbius take place in a different universe than that of the MCU, where Tom Holland’s Peter Parker lives. That means every character that has appeared in Tom Holland’s Spider-Man saga lives outside of the worlds inhabited by Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock and Jared Leto’s Morbius. That’s why we still haven’t seen Spider-Man fight Venom yet, even when the two are considered great adversaries.

The problem here is that Michael Keaton’s Vulture made an appearance in Morbius’ post-credits scene with no explanation at all. If you didn’t know, the Vulture was the antagonist in Tom Holland’s first Spider-Man movie, which means he lives in the universe where all of the MCU takes place and outside of Morbius’ dimension. The only hint we got as to how this crossover happened was given in a line of dialog where Adrian Toomes says: “I’m not sure how I got here. Has to do with Spider-Man, I think”.

For a long time, people assumed that was due to the events transcurred in Spider-Man: No Way Home, but things didn’t add up even then. The reason why multiple universes clashed with each other in Tom Holland’s latest Spider-Man adventure couldn’t have allowed The Vulture to travel to another world out of nowhere.

How multiversal travel works in Spider-Man: No Way Home

Spider-Man: No Way Home brought together three different versions of the wall-crawler, along with many iterations of his villains. But how exactly did the movie manage to do this? Well, when Spider-Man’s secret identity was revealed to the whole world, Peter asked Doctor Strange to make a spell that makes everybody forget he was the one behind the mask. However, things don’t go as planned and, instead, the spell makes everybody in the multiverse who knows Peter Parker is Spider-Man travel to the MCU.

While that allows Jaimie Foxx’s Electro and Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock to meet Tom Holland’s character, it still doesn’t explain how The Vulture ended up in Morbius’ world. It didn’t matter how long you thought about it, there was no explanation for this plot point… until now.

How Across the Spider-Verse fixes everything

(WARNING: There will be minor spoilers for Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse from this point onward)

Not only was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse amazing, but it also fixed Morbius’ post-credit scene. At the beginning of the film, we see how a Vulture from an alternate universe travels to Spider-Gwen’s world seemingly out of nowhere. After capturing him (with the help of Miguel O’Hara and Jess Drew), Gwen learns that there is a secret society of Spider-Men working together, with the sole purpose of protecting the multiverse’s existence.

This is a big task that includes capturing rogue villains that were pulled out of their respective dimensions into another. It’s then that we learn that the Alchemax collider in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse opened a portal wide enough that allowed people to be transported into random universes. The multiverse is collapsing thanks to Kingpin and Miles Morales, and now Miguel O’Hara is trying to put everything in order once again.

This explains how Michael Keaton’s Vulture was able to meet Dr. Michael Morbius. Moreover, it could also explain why Tom Hardy’s Venom was transported to the MCU even when he didn’t know Peter Parker is Spider-Man. I heavily doubt Sony planned all of this in advance, but it definitely makes narrative sense. It wouldn’t come as a surprise if the next project in Sony’s Spider-Man universe retcons this.

With the multiverse falling apart and bringing more characters together, who knows what crazy crossover we might see next? One thing that’s certain is that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 2 can’t come fast enough.