The Marvel Cinematic Universe needs Blade. He's just the perfect character to add to the 4th Phase of the franchise. But the truth is, there's just no way that Wesley Snipes will return to the titular role. And there's a reason behind why that is. Well, maybe a couple... After all, Wesley is known for being a bit of a diva. But that doesn't mean he's a great actor and almost perfect in the role that was absolutely massive for people of color in comic book movies. Thanks to a fantastic oral history of the making of the first Blade movie by Entertainment Weekly, we now know the precise origin of this piece of cinema history.
Let's take a look...
Making The First Black Superhero Film For Under 10 Million Dollars
Wesley Snipes played the very first black cinematic superhero in the 1998 vampire-hunter flick. The movie is wild and absolutely beloved. And all of that is owed to Wesley, producer Peter Frankfurt, screenwriter David Goyer, and director Stephen Norrington.
"This is what you need to know," producer Peter Frankfurt told Entertainment Weekly. "Basically, Blade is a three-legged stool: [David] Goyer wrote the script, Wesley was Blade and also a producer, and Stephen Norrington the director, he was really the guy, the auteur."
In the mid-1990s, the Marvel world looked nothing like it does today. In fact, most of the superheroes were owned by different studios as Marvel was bankrupt and was selling the rights to these characters to make some money. This is how Spider-Man ended up at Sony and X-Men ended up at Fox. So, many different filmmakers, with very different visions, got a chance to take a stab at a superhero film... If they could get it off the ground. After all, superhero films weren't nearly as popular back then.
"I’d been kicking around doing Van Damme movies, that kind of stuff," screenwriter David Goyer said. "I had heard that New Line wanted to make a lower-budget black superhero film. At the time Marvel was in bankruptcy, and they’d already sold the rights to X-Men and Spider-Man and a few other things, and I knew they were thinking about Luke Cage, Black Panther."
According to producer Peter Frankfurt, New Line wanted to produce a script for under 10 million dollars... The movie had to be tough. Dark. Fun. And kind of like a "hip-hop Marvel movie". And what better concept than a martial-arts fueled vampire hunting story?
The character of Blade was first introduced in 1973 in "The Tomb Of Dracula #10" and was created by Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan. Between then and the mid-90s, the character grew in popularity and was featured in some major stories under the Marvel banner.
"I suggested Blade, as a trilogy," David said. "I remember I came in and said 'I’m going to pitch you the Star Wars of black vampire films.' So I pitched it as this racial animosity between the purebloods and the turned vampires, the young Turks like Deacon Frost. And at the same time I wanted to talk about race in a subversive way, and it played into this half-breed idea, if you will — to have one foot in each world and not be accepted by either one."
During the development of the script, Peter Frankfurt, Stephen, and David kept adding in big action beats and aspects that nobody had quite seen in a superhero film before.
"It’s got elements of kung fu, it’s vampire, it’s a genre buster," Peter Frankfurt said. "The bad news is, it’s freaking expensive."
And this was a bit of a turn off to the studio who didn't think a film with a black lead would bring in the money. In fact, the studio even asked to change Blade to a white character... To which David S. Goyer said, "Absolutely f—ing not. Like, that is just terrible. You cannot do that."
The Star Dictated The Budget
According to the Entertainment Weekly article, the head of New Line Studio at the time told the filmmakers that they'd make the movie for $40 million if they were able to get Denzel Washington for the lead. They'd give the filmmakers $35 million if they got Wesley Snipes and they'd spend $20 million if they got Laurence Fishburne.
Luckily for the filmmakers, they thought they could make the movie for $35 million and definitely wanted to make it with Wesley Snipes.
"I mean, look, we never saw this as a vampire movie, we always saw this as a Marvel superhero movie that just was its own thing," Peter explained. "We always knew it was gonna be R[-rated], we knew it was gonna have a really heavy martial arts factor. Wesley was really into that, and we wanted it to be smart and kind of self-aware but not ironic you know?"