BLADE
II.

A DIRECTOR FIVE YEARS REMOVED FROM HOLLYWOOD

THE JOB DEL TORO TOOK AFTER HIS LAST AMERICAN FILM WAS TAKEN FROM HIM

Stephen Norrington’s Blade had turned a character Marvel once licensed away for a flat fee into a $131.2 million hit on a $45 million budget, and New Line wanted a sequel fast. Norrington wasn’t interested in coming back to direct it. Producers David S. Goyer and Peter Frankfurt were already looking for someone who could push the follow-up toward horror rather than repeat the first film, and both were already fans of one director’s earlier work.

“I admired Mimic and got to know Guillermo through that film. Both David Goyer and I have been fans of his since Cronos.”

Peter Frankfurt, Blade II producer, in official BFI Southbank programme notes

That earlier film, Mimic (1997), had not gone well for del Toro. Miramax’s Bob and Harvey Weinstein repeatedly rewrote the script, sent second-unit crews to shoot extra jump scares he hadn’t planned, and released a cut that dropped atmosphere he’d shot in favour of material aimed at nervous test audiences. Del Toro had wanted the creatures to be modified tree beetles; the studio insisted on cockroaches instead. He didn’t take another Hollywood job right away. “I was sick of Hollywood politics by that point, and I wanted to direct my personal movie that I’d had on the back burner for sixteen years,” he told interviewer Alan Jones. The Devil’s Backbone, a Spanish-language ghost story made far outside the studio system, reached screens in 2001, and it was that film, not Mimic, that New Line’s producers were really betting on when they hired him a year later.

Frankfurt was direct about what they wanted from him: “Guillermo understood what worked in the first movie and was very excited about keeping that kind of baseline and amplifying it in places, but then also bringing what he does best, to make it really, really scary.”

A VAMPIRE DESIGNED TO DISGUST, NOT SEDUCE

HOW THE REAPERS BECAME THE FILM’S OWN MONSTER, NOT JUST BLADE’S NEW ENEMY

Del Toro wanted the sequel’s villains to break from the vampire as tragic romantic lead entirely: a mutated strain whose lower jaw splits open into barbed, tentacled mouthparts to feed, closer to the creature in his own Mimic than to Dracula. Comic-book artists Mike Mignola, Tim Bradstreet and Wayne Barlowe were all brought in on early designs, and it was Barlowe’s take on the Reapers that effects artist Steve Johnson’s team built and operated as practical prosthetic suits rather than leaving the creature entirely to computer animation, matching del Toro’s preference for physical performance over digital effects.

The lead Reaper, Jared Nomak, went to Luke Goss, a former pop musician with almost no film experience, cast after a long conversation with del Toro rather than a formal audition. “No, no, it is okay, we can just talk,” Goss recalls being told, and after roughly an hour and ten minutes, del Toro said, “Okay, good, I think you will be great!” Playing a fully prosthetic villain across a demanding shoot reshaped how the industry saw him afterward.

“I owe him a great deal, a massive part of my career, and whatever momentum I now have I owe to him.”

Luke Goss, on Guillermo del Toro

A RETURNING LEAD AND A FUTURE HELLBOY

WESLEY SNIPES, RON PERLMAN AND THE BLOODPACK

Snipes returned as Blade alongside Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler, and the film widened its world with the Bloodpack, an elite vampire strike team assembled to hunt the Reapers alongside him: Ron Perlman as the sneering Reinhardt, Donnie Yen as Snowman (also the film’s fight choreographer), Leonor Varela as vampire councilwoman Nyssa, and Norman Reedus as tech specialist Scud.

Perlman’s Reinhardt turned out to be more than a supporting role. Del Toro wanted him for Hellboy two years later, but Revolution Studios initially preferred a bigger name, Vin Diesel, who was riding the success of xXx and The Fast and the Furious at the time. Del Toro didn’t think Diesel could deliver the nuance a heavily prosthetic lead required, and showed the studio Perlman’s footage from Blade II instead. It worked: Perlman got the part, and the pairing became one of the longest actor-director partnerships in genre film.

BIGGER BUDGET, BIGGER OPENING

HOW BLADE II OUTGREW THE FILM IT WAS BUILT ON

New Line spent roughly $54 million on Blade II against the original’s $45 million, a modest increase rather than a full franchise-scale jump. It opened on 22 March 2002 to $32.5 million, more than triple Blade’s $17.0 million opening four years earlier, and finished the weekend at number one.

The film went on to gross $82.3 million domestically and $155.0 million worldwide, ahead of the original’s $131.2 million total. That made it the highest-grossing entry in the Blade trilogy, a mark Blade: Trinity did not come close to beating two years later. For a director whose previous American studio film had been reworked and quietly released without him, it was also by a wide margin the biggest box-office hit he had ever put his name to.

THE REWATCH

A SEQUEL RATED LIKE THE ORIGINAL, AND A CAREER IT REBUILT

Reviews landed close to where the original had: Rotten Tomatoes lists Blade II at 57% from critics against a 68% audience score, and Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 52 from 28 critics, alongside a 7.1 user score. What changed the film’s reputation over time was what came after it. Blade: Trinity scored 24% on Rotten Tomatoes two years later and is widely regarded as the trilogy’s weak link, which is part of why Blade II, not the original, is the entry critics and fans now point to as the series’ high point.

For del Toro, the film changed the shape of his career. “It was absolutely a blast. It’s when I started to want to experience huge changes from one movie to the other,” he has said of the period, once summing up the tonal gap between his two 2001-2002 films as: “If The Devil’s Backbone is chamber music, Blade II is black metal.” He followed it two years later with Hellboy, casting Ron Perlman on the strength of what Blade II had already shown he could do with an actor under prosthetics, and has described the pairing as deliberate counter-programming: “When I did Blade and I did Hellboy it was sort of a counter to everything that was being done, it was a time in which superhero movies were not that dark and I wanted to make them dark and make them adult.”

For a first watch, Blade II sits directly after Blade in the Marvel movies in release order guide, the same connected scope that runs from Wesley Snipes’ original through X-Men and into the modern slate.