Film Notes: Blade

Fresh off a string of scene-stealing performances in '90s films like KING OF NEW YORK, NEW JACK CITY, and WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP, Wesley Snipes planned to use his considerable cultural cache to sell audiences on story they hadn't seen before: a Black superhero adapted from the then-flagging Marvel Comics. A full decade before a Disney-backed Marvel would take over the world with its mega-franchise, an adaptation of a Marvel comic was far from a sure thing. While Warner Bros. was cleaning up with Superman and Batman films, Marvel adaptations had floundered with flicks like the George Lucas-backed HOWARD THE DUCK or CAPTAIN AMERICA starring J.D. Salinger's kid. Snipes conceived of a high-budget Black superhero epic with visceral fight scenes, modern technology, and the ambition to tell a uniquely Black story about one of the first Black superheroes: Black Panther. Sadly for Snipes, the project stalled out, due in part to budget constraints and a lack of faith from the studios that a film about Black Panther could be a success. There were simply too many expectations and not enough faith, so Snipes pivoted to adapting a different Black marvel comics character that no one had any real expectations for: Blade.

And in a very real way, the character became Wesley Snipes—the origin story of a half-vampire Daywalker whose mother was bitten by a vampire during childbirth and a few visual details carried over, but the Snipes Blade was almost an entirely new creation. This version of the character wore leather and armor, stylish sunglasses, and rocked tattoos. This Blade was simply cool in exactly the way it needed to be for the '90s, and that spirit of reinvention carried into the actual production, too, with Snipes building out whole new scenes, lines of dialogue ("some motherf–ers always trying to ice skate uphill" was a Snipes riff on the day of the script reading), and action beats while filming on set.

In many ways, Snipes WAS Blade, the character becoming so integrated with the actor that no one even bothers to remember the television series that tried to recast Blade with Kirk "Sticky Fingaz" Jones. An R-rated vampire action film doesn't seem like the foundation upon which multi-billion dollar empires are built, but it's inarguable that Blade's success led to Marvel pitching out films for its lesser-known characters. Rather than hoping for big returns entirely from characters like Captain America or Spider-Man, BLADE showed that even a C- or D-lister, like, say, Iron Man, could connect with audiences if given the chance. But whatever credit or blame can be laid at the feet of the film for birthing the MCU military-industrial complex into the world, there's never been anything quite as cool as Blade striding into the vampire blood rave. As Snipes told Entertainment Weekly in an oral history of the film in 2018, "We had a chance to do something really cool. This was our version of Into the Dragon, with vampires.”