BLADE:
TRINITY.

FROM THE PAGE TO THE CHAIR

THE SCREENWRITER WHO SPENT TWO FILMS PREPARING TO DIRECT THE THIRD

Goyer wrote or co-wrote all three Blade screenplays, the only person credited on every entry in the trilogy. He took a producer credit on Blade II specifically to get closer to Guillermo del Toro’s process, using it, in his own words, as “a way of getting more of an excuse to be in the editing room, to ask Guillermo questions.”

By the time New Line handed him Trinity, Goyer framed his two prior years on set as direct preparation: “I was uniquely well prepared to direct it, because I’d been through as the writer two other films, so I knew what works and what didn’t work,” he said ahead of the film’s release, adding that he leaned on friends during the shoot itself for advice on stunts and effects he hadn’t personally overseen before.

His public account of the experience at the time was almost entirely upbeat. Talking to press while the film was still ahead of him rather than behind him, Goyer said he preferred directing outright: “it’s a lot more fun directing than just writing,” and went further still: “I had the best time of my life directing this movie.” Set against what he would say about the same shoot within a few years, that quote reads less like an exaggeration and more like a director who hadn’t yet had time to process what the production had cost him.

THE CONFLICT BEHIND THE CAMERA

THE ON-SET STANDOFF BETWEEN GOYER AND WESLEY SNIPES

What happened between Goyer and Snipes during filming has been described in sharply different ways by the two men. Snipes has partly corroborated one detail himself: asked in 2018 whether he communicated with Goyer through Post-it notes signed as his character, Snipes said, “That may have happened. I wouldn’t say it was frequent,” adding that the production’s physical layout, with crews “banished to another side” of the shoot, made written messages practical without radios.

“I don’t think anyone involved in that film had a good experience on that film, certainly I didn’t. I don’t think anybody involved with that film is happy with the results. It was a very tortured production.”

David S. Goyer

Goyer has stopped short of confirming the most extreme version of the story, that Snipes tried to strangle him on set, offering only a pointed non-answer: “Let’s just say I have tremendous respect for Wesley as an actor. He used to be a friend. We’re not friends anymore.” Snipes has denied the strangling claim outright: “If I had tried to strangle David Goyer, you probably wouldn’t be talking to me now. A Black guy with muscles strangling the director of a movie is going to jail, I guarantee you,” he said, adding that outside accounts tend to overlook his own standing on the production: “I remind you that I was one of the executive producers of the project. I had contractual director approval. I was not just the actor for hire.” Goyer’s own retrospective language has only hardened since: in September 2023 he called the shoot the “worst experience of my professional career,” describing it as an experience that left him “very depressed afterwards.”

A NEW TEAM, AND A SPINOFF THAT NEVER CAME

RYAN REYNOLDS, JESSICA BIEL AND THE NIGHTSTALKERS FILM NEW LINE NEVER MADE

Ryan Reynolds’ Hannibal King, a wisecracking vampire hunter who turns almost every scene into a joke, was his first major genre role. The connection to the part he’s now best known for started on this set: Reynolds has said a studio executive handed him a stack of Deadpool comics during production with a suggestion that stuck: “Seeing as you’re essentially playing this guy anyway, maybe you should play him for real.” Deadpool reached screens twelve years later.

Jessica Biel, cast as Abraham Whistler’s daughter Abigail, trained for three months before filming, including archery sessions an hour a day, six days a week, to handle her character’s crossbow. Her coach, Chuck Land, said her accuracy eventually matched a professional’s: “By the end of the film, she could have been a competitive archer… She’s the best bowman ever on the big screen.”

Reynolds and Biel’s characters, alongside Whistler, were built to launch a spinoff as much as to support this film. New Line’s Toby Emmerich confirmed the studio was waiting on Trinity’s home-video performance before deciding whether to greenlight it: “There are no plans right now for a Nightstalkers film until I see how well Blade: Trinity does on video.” Trinity never gave New Line the number it needed, and the spinoff was never made.

A LOUDER, FUNNIER BLADE

THE HUMOR GOYER ADDED ON PURPOSE, AND THE CRITICS WHO DIDN’T WANT IT

Where Norrington and del Toro had each played their films’ vampire mythology straight, Goyer built Trinity around more comedy than either predecessor, most of it routed through King’s running commentary. He has described the mix as deliberate rather than a drift in tone: the film has “loads of action, horror and drama, but it’s also chock full of humor,” he said, framing King’s jokes as a defense mechanism for a character with his own traumatic backstory rather than pure comic relief.

Critics weren’t persuaded the balance worked. Rotten Tomatoes’ collected consensus calls the film “louder, campier, and more incoherent than its predecessors,” arguing it “seems content to emphasize style over substance and rehash familiar themes.” Roger Ebert made a related point about what the series lost in the process, writing that Trinity “lacks the sharp narrative line and crisp comic-book clarity of the earlier films, and descends too easily into shapeless fight scenes.”

THE REWATCH

THE TRILOGY’S LOWEST SCORE, AND A RECONCILIATION TWO DECADES LATER

Trinity opened on 8 December 2004 to $16.1 million domestic, well behind Blade II’s $32.5 million debut two years earlier, and finished its run with $52.4 million domestically and $132.0 million worldwide on a $65 million budget, well above Blade II’s $54 million and the original’s $45 million, making it the trilogy’s weakest financial result relative to what New Line spent on it.

Reviews were the harshest the series had received. Rotten Tomatoes lists Blade: Trinity at 24% from 163 critics against a 58% audience score, and Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 38 from 30 critics, in its “generally unfavorable” band. Both scores mark it as the weakest-reviewed entry in the trilogy by a wide margin, the drop-off that this site’s own Blade II entry points to when explaining why that film, not the original, is now regarded as the series’ high point.

No fourth Snipes-led Blade film followed. Snipes has said relatively little about Trinity specifically in the years since, addressing the era more often through his relationship with Reynolds than through the film itself. When Reynolds first reached out about a Deadpool & Wolverine cameo in 2024, Snipes has said his instinct was to joke about their old reputation: “I was like, ‘I hate this guy.’ That’s a joke. We’ve been playing this for, like, two decades. We’ve actually liked each other the whole time!” For a first watch, Trinity closes the Wesley Snipes-led Blade trilogy and sits in the Marvel movies in release order guide within that same connected scope.