Daniel Espinosa

Daniel Espinosa, the director of the dark-tinged Marvel Comics Universe movie Morbius, began his filmmaking career with the well-reviewed Babylon Disease (2003), a frenetic look at aimless youth in Espinosa’s home city of Stockholm. Four years later, he directed Outside Love (2007), a romantic drama about the ill-fated relationship between the Jewish father of a young boy and a Pakistani woman, and was nominated for three Danish Film Awards.

Espinosa’s first major international project that brought him to the attention of Hollywood was the crime thriller Snabba Cash (2010), starring Joel Kinnaman and based on Jens Lapidus. It won three Swedish Film Institute awards (the Guldbagge Awards).

This led to Daniel Espinosa’s Hollywood debut, Safe House (2012), a CIA thriller co-starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds. Child 44 (2015) could have marked a major leap forward for Espinosa, directing a movie co-starring Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, Paddy Considine, Jason Clarke, and Vincent Cassel and produced by Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions.

Espinosa’s first movie to earn a worldwide gross above $100 million was Life (2017), a tense space drama co-starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ryan Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, and Hiroyuki Sanada. Espinosa established himself as a reliable director of brawny, large-scale productions, thus setting himself up nicely for any prospective MCU project.

The Jared Leto starring Morbius became his next assignment, promising the director’s biggest profile to date. Espinosa is slated to helm two war movies set in the Middle East, the first with Gyllenhaal, the second based on Clinton Romesha’s Afghanistan war memoir titled Red Platoon.