Jared Leto's 'Morbius' Release Date Delayed to April 2022

Etonline.com: Jared Leto's forthcoming Marvel debut will have to wait a bit longer before hitting theaters. Sony has pushed the release of Morbius back to April, ET has learned.

The film was originally slated to bow on January 28, but will now be released on big screens -- including IMAX release -- on April 1.

While there has been no official comment on the reason behind the schedule change, Deadline reports that the delay in release may be in response to the monumental success of Sony's Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Swinging into theaters on Dec. 17, Spider-Man: No Way Home quickly became the highest-grossing film of the year and has raked in over $1.3 billion since it's release. That popularity could pose a threat to Morbius' box-office earnings.

In the film, Leto stars as Dr. Michael Morbius, aka Marvel's Living Vampire. A character who first debuted in the pages of Spider-Man comics, Morbius is a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist-turned-bloodsucking antihero. 

Morbius joins Tom Hardy's Venom in Sony Picture's Marvel-verse of movies about Spider-Man's gallery of rogues, albeit sans Spider-Man himself.

This is the fifth time the film has changed release dates. Originally set to come out on July 10, 2020, it was then pushed to July 31. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the film was delayed until March 2021, then October and finally to its previous January 2022 date.