Wesley Snipes is synonymous with Blade, the half-human half-vampire martial arts using sword-wielding fearless vampire killer who launched a Marvel Comics movie franchise long before Black Panther, the different Avengers, or even the X-Men.
Here we’ll take a look at 10 Things You Never Knew About Blade.
THE STUDIO ASKED, “CAN BLADE BE WHITE?”
Released a decade before the world saw Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and twenty years before Black Panther shattered box office records, there was Blade. The Vampire Hunting antihero first appeared in 1973 in Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula.
He first made the leap to the big screen in 1998 with an eponymously titled movie, followed by Blade II in 2002 and Blade: Trinity in 2004. Each of them was written by future Dark Knight trilogy scribe David S. Goyer who also directed the third.
In a fantastic oral history conducted by Entertainment Weekly in 2018 to mark the film’s twentieth anniversary, Goyer revealed that he’d pitched Blade as a trilogy. “I came in and said, ‘I’m going to pitch you the Star Wars of black vampire films.” Goyer wanted to address race in a “subversive way,” noting Blade’s “half-breed” identity.
Goyer also said that the studio, at one point, asked, “Can Blade be white?” To which he replied, “Absolutely f-ng not. Like, that is just terrible. You cannot do that.”
LL COOL J AS BLADE
Way back in 1992, Variety ran a report about the state of different Marvel Comics characters in Hollywood. James Cameron was interested in Spider-Man. Columbia Pictures was after Black Panther and X-Men. Oliver Stone was in discussions about Elektra. Horror master Wes Craven was going to write and direct Doctor Strange. Television projects in development included the animated X-Men (which actually happened), a live-action Daredevil series, and a “web sale” live-action Black Widow.
Right in the middle of that story was another very interesting tidbit: rapper LL Cool J was developing Blade, described by the trade publication as simply, “the story of a black vampire hunter.” The same year, he was in the Robin Williams movie Toys.
DENZEL, WESLEY, OR LAURENCE
Producer Peter Frankfurt says the idea was to make Blade for less than $10 million-dollars, a “movie that would be tough and street like Juice - kind of a hip-hop Marvel movie.” As they added the blood club and increasingly ambitious action scenes to the script, the price tag skyrocketed. “It’s got elements of kung fu, it’s vampire, it’s a genre buster,” Frankfurt noted. “The bad news is, it’s freaking expensive.”
New Line studio head Mike De Luca told the production he’d give them $40 million to make the movie if they could secure Denzel Washington as the lead. He offered $35 million if they made it with Wesley Snipes, $20 million for Laurence Fishburne.
Goyer has said multiple times since that Snipes was always his number one choice.
SNIPES WAS ALMOST BLACK PANTHER
It’s hard to imagine now, but Marvel actually went bankrupt in 1996. Sony had secured the movie rights to Spider-Man and Fox had a firm grip on the X-Men. In January 2018, the Hollywood Reporter got Snipes to spill the tea for the first time on the Black Panther movie he almost made in the mid-90s, which led him into Blade.
When the company first approached him, Marvel’s movie history was littered with box-office bombs like Howard the Duck and Dolph Lundgren Punisher. Wesley Snipes was riding high on hits like New Jack City, Passenger 57, and Demolition Man.
Snipes loved the idea however, particularly the chance to depict Wakanda onscreen. Stan Lee gave Snipes his blessing, too. Marvel was able to lock down Columbia Pictures and began pursuing directors like Mario Van Peebles and John Singleton.
Snipes said they were never able to find the right combination of script and director and, “also at the time, we were so far ahead of the game in the thinking, the technology wasn’t there to do what they had already created in the comic book.”
The actor said the transition from Black Panther to Blade was smooth. “It was a natural progression and a readjustment,” he told THR. “They both had nobility. They were both 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,” he laughed.
He later added to EW, “We never lost the appetite to play in that world. So Blade seemed like a pretty good replacement. Fairly good, I mean - I don’t know if you may take vampires and replace Wakanda. But at the time it was a cool thing.”
JET LI AS DEACON FROST
The martial arts star was reportedly offered the role of the movie’s vampire villain, which ultimately went to Stephen Dorff. Li decided to do Lethal Weapon 4 instead.
DAVID FINCHER ALMOST DIRECTED
Goyer told MovieWeb about the filmmaker’s Blade flirtation. “I remember talking to David Fincher after Seven,” he revealed to us in 2004. “A lot of people don’t know that he was going to direct the first Blade. I even developed the script with him.”
Peter Frankfurt was friends with Fincher, who was finishing Seven at New Line when he offered some of his ideas for Blade. “I said, David, look, I would love to have you direct this movie. You’re my favorite director,” Frankfurt recalled to EW. “‘But I know you’re not gonna do it.’ We were going into a meeting with Mike De Luca and he couldn’t help himself. He started talking about the first act and what he wanted to do and I could see everybody just completely mesmerized and I knew right then we were gonna waste a year, which was basically exactly what happened.”
Frankfurt had seen Stephen Norrington’s Death Machine and was particularly impressed by the amount of balls-to-the-wall action involved on such a small budget. He found the director to be really personable and charismatic, as well. Norrington had actually worked directly with Fincher before, notably on Alien 3.
In the Blade DVD commentary, Stephen Dorff - who plays the film’s villain, Deacon Frost - said Fincher was actually visiting the set during his first day of filming.
THE BLOOD RAVE WASN’T EASY
Several of the extras quit immediately the first time the gallons of fake blood poured down on them. The movie’s cinematographer, Theo Van De Sande, told EW that one of the extras later sued, claiming he’d contracted a skin disease.
“Of course it’s not true,” he laughed. “Otherwise I would be dead by now.”
“It was a tough gig,” Snipes said. “They couldn’t change during lunch, they couldn’t wipe it off, for continuity. I applaud them… I mean, we thanked them at the time but I’m doing it again. Some of them are still traumatized from that experience.”
THE DISASTROUS TEST SCREENING
The first cut of Blade shown to audiences, nearly two and a half hours long, did poorly at its test screening. This resulted in a massive postproduction overhaul, which added the sword fight between Snipes and Dorff and excised some bits where the effects just weren’t working. The end result was a solid commercial hit, earning over $70 million domestically, which would be about $136 million in today’s terms.
BLADE’S CO-CREATOR SUED
“Blade Suit Seeks Slice of the Action for Its Creator,” read the LA Times in August, 1998. Award winning comic book scribe Marv Wolfman, who wrote well-received stories like New Teen Titans, Crisis on Infinite Earths and Batman: Year Three for DC back in the day, sued Marvel, New Line, and Warner Bros. for $35 million, arguing that he was not bound by a “work-for-hire” contract when he and artist Gene Colan created Blade. The suit was ultimately unsuccessful, according to Comics Journal.
BLADE & BATMAN
David S. Goyer wrote all of the Blade movies, directed the third, and was even involved in the short-lived Blade: The Series on Spike TV, which starred rapper Sticky Fingaz from Onyx. He credits Blade with many of his jobs afterward. “It was one of the primary reasons why Chris Nolan wanted me to write Batman Begins.”
Goyer went on to work on all of the Dark Knight trilogy, as well as the Christopher Nolan produced Man of Steel and its sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. His other comic book based credits include 1996’s The Crow: City of Angels, the Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV movie with David Hasslehoff, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, and on television, DC’s Constantine and the Superman prequel, Krypton.
