If many critics and many fans got the feeling that Morbius had suffered from a case of over-editing, with weird editing and a lot of deleted scenes, it’s because they’re right. We have a clear example in the film’s own trailers, which include scenes that we finally did not see in theaters.
A Al Madrigal, who appears as one of the main detectives in the film, had much of his material removed, including action scenes and comics. In fact, his character, Agent Rodriguez, was conceived as the comic relief of the film, but what we saw of him is only a tiny fraction of what he got to shoot. During a recent interview, the actor talks about how much of his work didn’t make it to the screen.
First of all, Morbius is not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. Sure, she had issues and they cut her off a bit. She had some funny lines that were cut from that movie. I was very funny. In London, when you shoot, they have a party in the middle of shooting the film and there is a big feast. The editors approached me. A group of them came over and said, ‘Oh my gosh, we see everything you’re doing. All things subtle. All the jokes’. I was able to improvise through that freely. If they had just left 50% more of my stuff… I was slaughtered in that thing. I think that’s what they did. Actually, because of COVID, they just had a lot of time to mess with it. They really messed with it.
In the trailers, Madrigal and Tyrese Gibson are seen preparing for what appears to be a major battle with the film’s villain, played by Matt Smith. According to Madrigal, that entire fight was cut because it took place in daylight, and some felt it wasn’t right for a vampire movie.
You saw a complete alternate ending to all of this. That scene you saw the footage of was shot during the day and the reason was, ‘We have a vampire movie. We can’t make the big final fight scene happen during the day.’ At some point Tyrese and I fought Matt Smith. I shot for six days and none of that was shown.