What's up with Morbius' end-credits scenes?

For the past few years now, the folks at Sony Pictures have been at work building their own little live-action universe out of supporting characters drawn from Marvel's Spider-Man comics. Until now, that's meant two Venom films and a lot of development news on other potential projects, but then along came Morbius.

Starring Jared Leto as the title character, a scientist who turns himself into Marvel's living vampire via blood experiments, the new film is actually rather intimate in scope. For most of its runtime, it's pretty tightly focused on Dr. Michael Morbius, the people closest to him, and how his experiments and resulting transformation affect them all. But this is still a Marvel movie, which means we all knew to expect sequences in the credits that would point the way toward what's next, and on that score Morbius definitely delivered. So, let's take a look at the credits scenes from the film, and break down where they might lead us in Sony's growing Spider-Verse.

**SPOILERS AHEAD for Morbius, including the end credits scenes (obviously)**

So, it looks like Sony's taking a swing at this Sinister Six thing again. 

Throughout all of Morbius' main story, absent the occasional throwaway line referencing the Venom films ("that thing in San Francisco," etc.), the movie sticks to its own, rather self-contained narrative. We meet Morbius (Jared Leto), learn about his disease, watch him try to cure and instead become a living vampire, then watch him battle his best friend (Matt Smith) who has the same blood disease and has no qualms about the whole living vampire side effect thing. If you were paying attention to the film's trailers over the past couple of years, you may have been expecting at least a little more connective tissue, particularly a moment or two with Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), aka Spider-Man: Homecoming's The Vulture. 

Well, the credits sequences are where we get our Vulture fix, and it arrives along with some of the multiverse shenanigans that impacted the conclusion of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and much of Spider-Man: No Way Home. Just as Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) found himself accidentally sucked into the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the end of his sequel, so too does Vulture find himself in another world. After the movie ends, we see that he arrives in the same universe where Morbius and Venom reside. Toomes appears in a jail cell, since presumably he was already in one back in his MCU life, and seems both surprised and intrigued by his new surroundings. 

A news report then reveals that, since there's no supercriminal named Adrian Toomes in the Sony-verse (yet), authorities have no choice but to release the Vulture back into the wild because, as far as this reality is concerned, he's never done anything wrong. So our man Adrian is free as a bird (Get it? Because vultures are... never mind), and he's got big plans. 

The second end-credits scene reveals that Adrian has not only managed to rebuild his entire Vulture get-up, jet wings and all (maybe the Tinkerer has already set up shop in this universe?), and used them to arrange a clandestine meeting with a newly-free and healthy Morbius. The meeting is blissfully short. Vulture's been doing some reading, he sees an opportunity, he wants to form a team with Morbius, one that is comprised of "guys like us." The implication is clear. It's Sinister Six, or Sinister Six-adjacent, time in the Sony-verse. 

There are, of course, plenty of unanswered questions looming over this meeting and the various character puzzle pieces that have to fall into place for this to work.

What would make Morbius, a guy who resisted harming people for most of his own movie, want to team up with a guy like Toomes in the first place? Why did Morbius decide to stick around at all after he planned to use the antibody serum that killed Milo on himself, and put an end to his strain of vampirism? What reading has Toomes done to make him think Morbius is a guy to hook up with?

And perhaps, most importantly, why does Morbius not look surprised when Toomes says his arrival has "something to do with Spider-Man"? Does he know about Spider-Man, and if so, which Spider-Man? 

Assuming Morbius accepts the invitation, this gives Sony an opportunity to do the villain team-up flick they've hoped for ever since the closing credits of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 almost a decade ago. As a founder of the Sinister Six, and one of the most consistent members in the pages of Marvel Comics, it makes sense that Vulture would run point on this. But who else will be on the team?

Well, eagle-eyed viewers probably caught a few Easter eggs in Morbius (there's a headline referencing the Chameleon in the Daily Bugle), we already know a Kraven the Hunter movie is on the way, and there's no shortage of symbiotes running around the Sony-verse. 

So, yeah, provided things don't spiral again, some version of the iconic team seems likely, which leads us to ask: Who will they fight?

Will it just be some kind of Suicide Squad-esque mission that positions the whole team as antiheroes, or are we really on some kind of collision course in which some version of Spider-Man will arrive to battle this iconic team? None of this is clear, yet, but what is clear is just how ready the Morbius credit scenes are to lay down this gauntlet. There's no time wasted carving out wiggle room. Vulture wants a team, Vulture's gonna go get his team. That means there's a very good chance we'll see another epic Spider-Man villain showdown very soon, and it might not be the one you think. 

We just hope they have the decency to let Paul Giamatti have the time of his life as Rhino again along the way.