A HELICOPTER deposits sickly JARED LETO and a handful of MERCENARIES in front of a CAVE on a CLIFF.

JARED LETO

Okay, here we are at this remote, perilous location so I can get me some vampire bats!

MERCENARY

Question: why did we have to come to such an inconvenient place to get an animal that can be found in most countries across South and Central America? Heck, it probably would have been cheaper and easier to just buy a crate of them online.

JARED LETO

I guess the audience just has to assume that this one cave is home to a specific kind of magic vampire bat that I learned about somehow, not that we ever say any such thing. Now you big tough mercenaries are free to go, me and my skinny anaemic arms will be fine to collect the hundreds and hundreds of bats.

MERCENARY

How, exactly? I can’t help but notice you don’t have any nets or cages or equipment of any kind except for some weird goo-dripping device which appears to do nothing at all. And once we leave in the helicopter you won’t even have transport.

JARED LETO

It’s okay, I’ll just cut myself to draw out the huge swarm of bloodsucking parasites, then we’ll jump into a flashback before anybody can think too hard about what the hell is supposed to happen next.

INT. CHILDREN’S HOSPITAL, GREECE

YOUNG JARED meets YOUNG MATT SMITH in a RESEARCH HOSPITAL for KIDS WITH BLOOD DISEASES.

YOUNG MATT SMITH

Hi, my character name is Lucien. My equivalent from the comics is called Loxias, but I guess they thought that sounded even more stupidly made-up and over-the-top evil than “Doctor Morbius”.

YOUNG JARED LETO

So you have the same debilitating blood disease as me, huh? So I guess you’ll wind up taking the same experimental cure as me, and getting the same superpowers as me but you’ll use them for evil, and then I’ll have to fight and kill you in the climax.

YOUNG MATT SMITH

Yes, we have in fact clumsily telegraphed all of that in the first three minutes of the movie.

The BLOOD MACHINE that YOUNG MATT is hooked up to suddenly malfunctions, and YOUNG MATT starts to die! YOUNG JARED quickly fixes it and saves his life, impressing DOCTOR JARED HARRIS.

JARED HARRIS

Wow, other Jared, you’re a scientific genius! Somehow nobody noticed this until just now! I want to send you to a special school.

YOUNG JARED LETO

But that would mean leaving Matt behind! He’s like my brother!

JARED HARRIS

You met him about an hour ago and didn’t bother to learn his name.

YOUNG JARED LETO

Yes but dramatically it works better if he’s like my brother, so even if I’m self-contained and aloof, and he’s kind of an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, he’s gonna be like my brother all right?

INT. LAB

Back in the present, JARED is working in a lab with ADRIA ARJONA.

ADRIA ARJONA

Congratulations on winning the Noble Prize, Jared. Yes, we’re introducing a brilliant medical researcher by having her mispronounce “Nobel Prize”. But did you have to tell the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to go ♥♥♥♥ themselves in your speech?

JARED LETO

Pfft, what do those ivory-tower eggheads know? Yes I may have invented a synthetic blood substitute which has “saved more lives than penicillin”, but that was just an accidental discovery while I was trying to cure my own illness, which I still haven’t done, so as far as I’m concerned that was all a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ waste of time!

ADRIA ARJONA

Ah, so the only life that our hero thinks is worth saving is his own, that’s good to know. At any rate, I’m really not sure about your latest experiment, with the vampire bats.

JARED LETO

Wh-what? How did you know about that?! That was supposed to be a total secret that nobody in the lab ever suspected!

Rolling her eyes, ADRIA points three feet over to the ENORMOUS EIGHT-FOOT-WIDE AND TWENTY-FOOT-HIGH TRANSPARENT CYLINDER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM, FILLED WITH WITH HUNDREDS OF FRANTIC BATS.

JARED LETO

Oh yeah, I guess that’s a bit of a giveaway.

(sheepish shrug)

So sue me, I’m doing some illegal bat experiments. I just figured, vampire bats EAT blood, I have a disease IN my blood, so if I shove some bat DNA into myself then I should be cured. SCIENCE!

He injects some BAT DNA into a lab rat, and it immediately DIES. But then moments later it UN-DIES.

JARED LETO

Hooray, it worked! Now I can do the same procedure to myself!

ADRIA ARJONA

Really? You don’t want to do more than one single test before you move on to human trials? Like, what do you even mean “it worked”? Did that rat have the same super-rare blood disease as you, and you can tell on sight that it’s been cured?

JARED LETO

I think I just mean it worked as in the rat didn’t die all that much.

ADRIA ARJONA

Shouldn’t you at least observe it for a while to see if there are side effects? I mean, given what we see later, I’m pretty sure you just created a superhumanly strong flying rat that feasts on the blood of other rats.

JARED LETO

While that sounds AMAZING, I can’t be bothered to stick around and see if it happens. To international waters!

(grabs science, sprints out of lab)

INT. SHIP

JARED and ADRIA enter INTERNATIONAL WATERS on a SHIP staffed entirely by SCUZZY MERCENARIES.

ADRIA ARJONA

I think this experiment is a bad idea, Jared.

(straps him to chair)

You’re meddling with forces you don’t understand. I think this could all go terribly wrong, in ways we couldn’t possibly imagine.

(pumps him full of bat juice)

I sure hope my dropping everything and risking my career to help you do this isn’t sending an inconsistent message here.

The SERUM turns JARED into a HIDEOUS GNARLED MONSTER! He immediately starts EATING the crew of the SHIP.

JERK MERCENARY

(throat getting torn out)

ACK!! OH WELL GOOD THING THEY VAGUELY REFERENCE THAT WE’RE ALL TERRIBLE PEOPLE IN SOME WAY OR OTHER

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MERCENARY

(being ripped in half)

YEP WITH ALL THE MONEY JARED’S THROWING AROUND YOU THINK HE COULD HAVE GOTTEN ANY NUMBER OF DECENT RELIABLE SAILORS TO DO THIS, BET HE’S GLAD HE HIRED ONLY VICIOUS CRIMINALS NOW

ADRIA ARJONA

And I’m glad that while consumed by an irrational bloodlust, Jared’s conveniently only killing the mercs, and leaving the totally vulnerable love interest who’s just lying there alone.

Eventually JARED’S kill frenzy ends, and he reverts to a more muscly version of his normal self.

INT. LAB

Back in his LAB, JARED explores his new condition.

JARED LETO

Now I have to eat blood to survive. I can get by on the Mountain Blast Powerade-colored fake blood I invented, but that’s getting less effective with time, and I will be forced to resort to drinking real blood in roughly UNKNOWN weeks and NOT SPECIFIED days!

He takes a swig of FAKE BLOOD, trying to suck it right out of the IV BAG like it’s a JUICE BOX or something, I mean maybe consider keeping it in a thermos buddy.

JARED LETO

On the bright side, whenever I drink my Smurf juice it gives me a vaguely-defined collection of random superpowers! Super strength! Sometimes super speed, kinda! Almost flight, ish! A really useless-seeming version of sonar! Occasionally I can climb on walls a little, and once or twice I appear to teleport like Nightcrawler? I dunno! Best of all, I have these squiggly vapor trails whenever my powers activate, which hopefully helps to conceal how terrible my special effects look!

He steps into the BAT TUBE and lets the BATS FLAP ALL AROUND HIM in a shot directly copy-pasted from BATMAN BEGINS.

JARED LETO

Also, now the bats see me as one of them, so they’re my friends! See how they swarm all around me without eating me? That would never have happened before I had my bat powers!

BAT

We did this exact thing on that cliff in Costa Rica. It was the first thing that happened in the movie.

JARED LETO

Whatever, the point is that I’m basicall