The general audience may not have been familiar with this Marvel Comics character, but there was interest in bringing him to the screen. The adaptation passed from company to company, Richard Roundtree and L.L. Cool J were considered for the lead role. David Fincher was one of the directors who signed on, then dropped out. But eventually, it all came together in the right way at the right time, helping usher in a golden age of Marvel film adaptations. How could a lesser-known character have such a successful film? Let’s dig into it and find out What Happened to Blade.
Created by writer Marv Wolfman and penciller Gene Colan, Blade debuted in the comic book The Tomb of Dracula in 1973. Becoming one of the rare Black superheroes at the time. A vampire bit his mother while she was in labor, leaving him immune to vampire bites but still able to walk around in the daylight. He dedicated his life to wiping out vampires, a goal that took him on several adventures through the run of The Tomb of Dracula. He also got solo stories in the books Vampire Tales and Marvel Preview and fought Morbius the Living Vampire in Adventure into Fear. Then Blade faded into the background for a while… But he came back in a big way in the early ‘90s, when he was made part of the Midnight Sons team of supernatural heroes. Allowing him to fight alongside Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, and Morbius again, among others.
The idea of making a Blade movie first came up in the mid-’80s, when Marv Wolfman took a meeting with the low budget production company New World Pictures. Asked which Marvel Comics characters could carry a film with a New World price tag, Wolfman suggested Blade. A screenplay was written by Lee Goldberg and William Rabkin, whose shared credits included Spenser: For Hire and Baywatch. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, was the top choice to play Blade, but the project didn’t move forward for unknown reasons. A few years later, the Batman movie was a massive hit for Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema took note, picking up comic book adaptation rights in the ‘90s, including The Mask, Spawn, and Blade.
Future Dark Knight screenwriter David S. Goyer was getting his career rolling at that time, writing Full Moon and martial arts movies. He had been hired to write Marvel Comics adaptations that kept falling apart: Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, Venom. Those characters wouldn’t get movies until many years later. But when Goyer found out New Line had the Blade rights, he went in with a pitch. The studio was planning to make a comedic movie with a budget of six to eight million dollars. L.L. Cool J was being considered for the lead role. Taking the character and concept deadly seriously, Goyer laid out his vision for a trilogy. And his ideas inspired New Line to boost the budget to forty-five million dollars.
Wesley Snipes had recently secured the rights to make a movie based on the Marvel character Black Panther. He took the project to Columbia Pictures and The Road Warrior co-writer Terry Hayes worked on the script, but Snipes couldn’t find a director that fit the material. He also felt that the technology wasn’t there to properly bring the advanced society of Wakanda to the screen around the character. So he set the idea aside. When the Blade offer came to him, he read the first draft of Goyer’s script and signed on to star in the film. As he told The Hollywood Reporter decades later, “It was a natural progression and a readjustment. Black Panther and Blade both had nobility. They both were fighters. So I thought, ‘Hey, we can’t do the King of Wakanda and the Vibranium and the hidden kingdom in Africa, let’s do a Black vampire.’” The film would allow him to play a cool character who did martial arts and wore leather, so he was into it. As Goyer described the Blade character to Fangoria, “He’s filled with self-loathing; he basically operates only on hate, both for the people who made him what he is and for himself. He uses that anger to motivate himself. … He’s not human, but he’s not a vampire – he’s caught between these two worlds.”
New Line considered several directors for the film, possibly even Sam Raimi, who you might have heard went on to direct other superhero movies. Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight director Ernest Dickerson was set to take the helm, but then he dropped out. So New Line gave the job to their Seven director David Fincher. Goyer worked with him to develop a new draft. As Goyer told the Happy Sad Confused podcast, “I remember going to our producers’ office, and there was this giant conference table. Fincher laid out forty to fifty books of photography and art with Post-It notes inside them. He said, ‘This is the movie.’ He took us on a two-hour tour around the table of the aesthetics of this scene, that character. It was such a fully fleshed-out visual pitch. I had never seen something like that before. A lot of that thinking infused my further revisions.” Although Fincher had the whole movie envisioned, he didn’t stick with it. Still, some of his notes did make it to the screen. He had told Goyer, “On the road to enlightenment, you have to kill your mother, kill your father, and kill Buddha.” This is why, over the course of the film, Blade discovers that his mother is still alive and a vampire, so he has to kill her. Why he loses his male mentor. And why, as he prepares for the final battle, he destroys his Zen altar.
The director who took Blade through production was Stephen Norrington, a visual effects artist who had made the low-budget horror film Death Machine. Snipes was impressed by Norrington’s work on that movie and saw he’d be a perfect fit for Blade. The director and Goyer clashed over lines of dialogue and the tone of certain scenes, but they were able to work through their issues. And it was Norrington who brought in Greg Cannom to provide the special effects. Cannom and his crew created some memorable sights for the film.
Goyer’s script was the perfect way to introduce audiences to the Blade character. And it has one of the best opening sequences in cinema history. Following a flashback to Blade’s birth, we see a woman played by Traci Lords taking a young man to a rave club that’s hidden in the back of a slaughterhouse. As the party rages on, blood starts to pour out of the sprinkler system and the young man realizes he’s surrounded by vampires. Just when it looks like this guy is going to be torn apart, Blade shows up and kicks vampire ass all over the place. But he isn’t able to finish off a vampire called Quinn, played by Donal Logue, before the police arrive. Quinn’s burned body is taken to a hospital, where the vampire bites hematologist Doctor Karen Jenson, played by N’Bushe Wright. There’s a chance Karen can be cured before she turns, so Blade takes her back to his headquarters, where his mentor, Kris Kristofferson as veteran vampire slayer Whistler, gives her a “garlic and silver” treatment.
Karen is the audience surrogate character. We learn about this world of vampires through her eyes. She becomes a sidekick to Blade on his quest to wipe out all bloodsuckers. And they discover there’s a power struggle in the vampire community. Tired of being disrespected by the natural-born vampires, the turned vampires are staging an uprising. Led by Deacon Frost, the vampire who bit Blade’s mother, they overpower the vampire elders, including Udo Kier. They plan to use Blade’s blood to conjure the blood god La Magra, which will kick-start a vampire apocalypse. The remaining humans in the world will be kept in bags and harvested for blood.
Deacon Frost was originally envisioned as a smooth, sophisticated Alan Rickman type. But when Stephen Dorff was cast, he became a young-looking guy who’s on an eternal bender. While trying to stop Frost, Blade crosses paths with some interesting characters: Arly Jover as Frost’s vampire lover Mercury, Kevin Patrick Walls as a human cop who is one of Frost’s servants, Eric Edwards as the obese vampire Pearl, Tim Guinee as Karen’s ex, who becomes a zombie sort of creature instead of a vampire. And Sanaa Lathan as Blade’s mother, Vanessa, who has spent thirty years hanging out with Frost.
Norrington’s first cut of the film was one hundred and forty minutes long. It was screened for a test audience – and it was a disaster. Twenty minutes had to be cut from the film, and there were reshoots to fix the ending. Originally, Frost transformed into La Magra – represented on screen as a swirling, CGI blob of blood. The audience hated it. So the filmmakers brought Snipes and Dorff back to the set to have a climactic swordfight instead. That went over much better.
The film’s release was delayed several months due to the editing and reshoots. But when it reached theatres in August of 1998, it was a hit, earning over one hundred and thirty million dollars at the global box office. Blade came along at a bad time for comic books and comic book movies. The most recent comic book adaptations had been DC’s Steel and Batman & Robin. Marvel had always struggled to get their characters on the screen. They had some success on television with The Incredible Hulk, but few fans had been impressed by the ’70s Captain America TV movies, the 1990 Captain America movie, or The Punisher, starring Dolph Lundgren. Goyer had contributed to the series of underwhelming adaptations, writing the TV movie Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., starring David Hasselhoff. Marvel Comics had even filed for bankruptcy in 1996. But Blade reminded studios and movie-goers that comic book movies could be really cool when handled correctly.
The film paved the way for a new era of comic book adaptations, particularly Marvel Comics movies. It was quickly followed by films that had bigger budgets and were respectful of the source material, like X-Men and Spider-Man. Within a decade of the film’s release, Marvel Comics had launched Marvel Studios so they could make some of these adaptations on their own. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe was born.
Blade‘s success also opened the door to sequels. Goyer got to write a trilogy, as he always intended. The follow-ups didn’t include all of the elements he had in mind; there was no vampire apocalypse, no time travel, no appearance by Morbius the Living Vampire. But he did get to work with Guillermo del Toro on Blade II and brought Dracula into the mix for Blade: Trinity. The trilogy was followed by a short-lived TV series where Blade was played by rapper Sticky Fingaz. And then, twenty years after the third movie’s release, Snipes reprised the role in Deadpool & Wolverine.
In 2019, it was announced that Mahershala Ali will play Blade in an MCU reboot… But six years later, Marvel still hasn’t been able to crack the script. The project has been stuck in development hell. Back in ‘98, Goyer and Norrington made it look easy. But making a badass martial arts vampire movie isn’t as simple as it looks. Even Goyer stumbled with the ending of his trilogy. But with the first Blade, he took an obscure character and delivered one of the best comic book adaptations we’ve ever seen. The trouble Marvel has had with the reboot just drives it home even more that Blade was a special event that’s worth celebrating. So stop trying to ice skate uphill and go take in another viewing of this awesome movie.
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Arrow in the Head
