Blade: The Trials and Tribulations of Marvel’s Vampire Hunter
Things are not looking so great for Blade’s entry into the MCU
If you’re like me and have been following the saga of Disney/Marvel Studios trying to put out a Blade reboot in the MCU, then you’re probably aware that things have not gone smoothly. Mahershala Ali (who signed on to play the badass vampire hunter) has been the only constant throughout the arduous process of making this film, and everything else has been in a constant state of flux. Ali was announced as playing Blade back in 2019. Bassam Tariq signed on to direct, Stacy Osei-Kuffour was chosen to write the screenplay, and the film was given a November 2023 release date. Since then the film has been delayed multiple times, multiple screenwriters have joined and left the production, and two directors have quit with Yann Demange reportedly exiting the film just this month. It is starting to feel like a cursed production at this point, and I’m skeptical that the film ever gets made at this point.
Those are the facts as we know them thus far. It has not been made public what sorts of issues the production has faced that has caused it to be such a mess. That being said, I do think we can extrapolate some information from previous MCU films and apply it here. The last six feature films made by Disney/Marvel Studios have all had budgets of at least $250 million. These are massive tentpole films with gigantic CGI set pieces. I am willing to bet that Blade is being treated the same way. What I would suggest to Marvel Studios (I’m sure Kevin Feige is reading my Substack) is that this is not how they should be handling this particular character.
Blade is one of the few Marvel characters who is significantly more popular in film and television than he ever has been in the comics. He has always been a C-list character at best. He first appeared in The Tomb of Dracula #10 (1973) by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan as Dracula’s primary adversary. He was a British vampire hunter who was immune to vampire bites due to his mother getting bitten while she was pregnant with him. He had no other powers (aside from being cool as hell). It’s a pretty far cry from the popular depiction of him today. Blade remained little more than a side character in someone else’s book for the entirety of the 1970s, and he really fell out of favor (along with the majority of Marvel’s monsters from that era) once the 1980s rolled around.
Blade would come back into focus on the wave of “grim and gritty” comics that became all the rage in the 1990s. Marvel began reintroducing some of their supernatural and horror based characters from the 1970s in a crossover arc called “Rise of the Midnight Sons” that ran through five different series and six total comics. It featured characters such as Johnny Blaze (the original Ghost Rider who is now human with a shotgun that shoots hellfire), Ghost Rider (Danny Ketch), Morbius (the living vampire), Hannibal King (an undead vampire), Frank Drake (a descendant of Dracula), and our beloved Blade among others. Blade’s character design had gone through a pretty significant change. Gone were the afro, green shades, and trench coat. He now sported a black leather outfit and a fade. Much more ‘90s. The event spun him off into a new ongoing series called Nightstalkers (1992) by D.G. Chichester and Ron Garney where he led the eponymous team made up of himself, Hannibal King, and Frank Drake. The series ran for eighteen issues from 1992 until 1994. That’s an impressive run for a team of supporting characters from the 1970s.
That 1990s success led to Blade appearing in the Spider-Man animated series in a pair of episodes in 1995 voiced by J.D. Hall. The important thing to note here is that this Blade has an American accent. This would signal the beginning of the end of Blade being portrayed as a British character.
Then along came 1998. New Line Cinema had been kicking around the idea of making a feature film starring Blade throughout the 1990s with intention of it being a tongue-in-cheek spoof since superhero comic book movies were not thought of too highly in Hollywood at that time. David S. Goyer reportedly caught wind of this and pitched a version that would treat the character seriously, and he was given the green light to pen the script. Goyer also wanted Wesley Snipes to play the titular character. This ended up working out perfectly as Snipes was already familiar with Marvel Comics and had been trying (unsuccessfully) for years to get a movie made about Black Panther with himself in the lead. Snipes took the role of Blade in 1996, and he helped produce the film using his own production company (Amen Ra Films). Stephen Norrington was brought in to direct, and filming began in 1997 with a $45 million budget. This was a pretty big risk considering a Marvel Comics property had never been developed into a successful feature film. On top of that, this film would be going for an R-rating. Blade would open in the United States on August 21, 1998. It would end up making $131.2 million during its theatrical run. In other words, Blade was a huge success.
The appeal of the movie is obvious: it just oozes cool. Wesley Snipes was at the height of his popularity, and he just immediately made Blade the coolest character in the world. The combination of his martial arts skills and killer one-liners are what sell the movie. The gallons and gallons of blood in the movie don’t hurt either for horror fans like myself.
The success of Blade as a movie far outpaced the success of the comics Blade had appeared in up to that point. This was clearly something Marvel noticed as they began altering the comic book version to more accurately resemble the movie version. As I mentioned earlier, Blade in the comics didn’t have any superpowers other than being immune to vampire bites. The movie version was very different. This version was given the honorific of “The Daywalker” by the vampires in the film because he had inherited all of the strengths and abilities of vampires with none of the weaknesses due to his mother being bitten while pregnant with him. He had super strength, speed, endurance, invulnerability, and heightened senses like other vampires, but he could also walk freely in sunlight and had no vulnerabilities to things like garlic or silver. He was significantly more powerful than the comic book version.
The comic book version would end up gaining these powers himself in the pages of Peter Parker: Spider-Man #7-8 (1999) by Howard Mackie and John Romita, Jr. Blade ends up getting bitten by Morbius during this story, and it miraculously gives Blade all of the same powers as his movie counterpart. It’s rationalized by saying Morbius as a scientifically created living vampire has a different effect on Blade’s physiology than a bite from a supernatural undead vampire. Good enough for me!
This would spin-off into a new Blade: Vampire Hunter series by Bart Sears and Andy Smith in 1999, but it would only last for six issues. Despite the surprising success of the film, it did not seem to be translating into comic sales. It did, however, translate into a sequel film.
Blade II was released in 2002 with Snipes back in the lead, Goyer writing, and Guillermo del Toro joining as the director. This one goes for more of a horror feel as Blade has to team up with the traditional vampires to deal with an even worse strain of vampires called Reapers. The budget slightly increased from $45 million to $54 million for the sequel, and it was money well spent as it would go on to make $155 million at the box office. It was an even bigger hit than the original. My controversial take is that it’s an even better movie than the first one as well. Suddenly Blade was now a proven commodity at the box office.
That success (with Goyer writing both films) led to a third film being released two years later in 2004 with Goyer both writing and directing. Snipes returned as Blade, but his role was deemphasized in favor of a pair of younger vampire hunters named Hannibal King and Abigail Whistler (played by Ryan Reynolds and Jessica Biel respectively) in hopes that they could carry the franchise going forward. The movie had a budget of $65 million and made a respectable $132 million at the box office, but it was reviled by critics and fans alike combined with a notoriously disastrous production which effectively killed the franchise.
Blade has remained a fixture in Marvel Comics in the decades since, but he has never been able to achieve the same kind of success as he has on the big screen. He is currently the central figure in Marvel’s companywide crossover Blood Hunt event comic from Jed MacKay and Pepe Larraz, and I’m sure Feige and others are hoping for some brand synergy for when the MCU reboot finally gets made.
Here’s where I pay off my initial statement about how Disney/Marvel Studios should handle the Blade reboot. They’ve already made the most important decision which is casting someone who can immediately make the character cool. Mahershala Ali is one of the coolest actors in Hollywood, so they nailed that one. They should also embrace the hard R-rating that the previous films had. It’s a movie about vampires, so you’re going to need plenty of blood. Don’t shy away from that. Most importantly, a movie about a badass who hunts vampires doesn’t need a $250+ million budget full of CGI action sequences. Just let Blade engage in hand-to-hand (or sword-to-face) combat with a horde of vampires. Even when calculated for inflation, the first two film each costed under $100 million to make. There is simply no need to dump a small fortune into the budget of this film. A movie with a $250+ million budget will almost certainly go for a PG-13 rating to attract a wider audience which will only turn off the people most likely to be interested in a Blade reboot in the first place. Hopefully Disney/Marvel Studios isn’t making things too needlessly difficult on themselves as I fear they are. To that, I have only one thing to say: