BLADE.

A CHARACTER LICENSED FOR $25,000

WHAT A BANKRUPT MARVEL SIGNED AWAY BEFORE ANYONE KNEW ITS WORTH

New Line Cinema licensed the film rights to Blade from Marvel on 24 December 1993, years before a script, director or star existed. Marvel agreed to a flat $25,000 fee, one of several licensing deals it struck cheaply during the mid-1990s while its own finances collapsed: Spider-Man went to Sony, X-Men and Fantastic Four went to Fox, and a little-known vampire hunter went to a studio best known for horror sequels.

On 27 December 1996, Marvel Entertainment Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The reorganisation that followed, folding Toy Biz into the company to form Marvel Enterprises, was confirmed by the court on 31 July 1998, three weeks before Blade reached theatres. The timing is a coincidence rather than a rescue: Marvel’s flat fee meant the studio saw almost none of the film’s eventual box office directly.

That arrangement is part of why Blade’s success reads so differently in hindsight than it did at the time. A character Marvel had all but given away turned into proof that its library was worth more than the licensing terms it had been signing.

A ROLE THAT REPLACED ANOTHER

HOW WESLEY SNIPES ENDED UP PLAYING A B-LIST VAMPIRE HUNTER

Wesley Snipes had spent years trying to get a Black Panther film off the ground. When that project stalled, he and his team turned their attention to a different Marvel character instead.

“It was kind of serendipitous. We were talking about doing Black Panther. But that didn’t come to be, and we never lost the appetite to play in that world.”

Wesley Snipes, on how Blade replaced an abandoned Black Panther film

Snipes signed on in 1996, reportedly ahead of Denzel Washington, an early studio wishlist name for a Black-led action lead. He then produced the film himself through his own company, Amen-Ra Films, an unusually high level of creative control for a character with nowhere near the public profile of the X-Men or Spider-Man at the time.

A SCRIPT THAT OUTLASTED ITS FIRST DIRECTOR

DAVID FINCHER DEVELOPED IT, THEN LEFT TO MAKE SE7EN

David S. Goyer’s screenplay began development with David Fincher attached to direct. Fincher reportedly pitched his take by laying out stacks of photography and art books at a meeting and telling the room, “This is the movie.” He left the project to direct Se7en (1995) instead, and Goyer kept developing the script through Stephen Norrington and Wesley Snipes joining a year later, finishing a draft around 1996.

New Line initially wanted a lighter, more comedic version of the character. Goyer pushed to play the vampire mythology straight and treat Blade’s own rage as something closer to horror than parody, the version that ultimately reached the screen.

ONE DIRECTOR AGAINST THE NOTES

THE STUDIO NOTES STEPHEN NORRINGTON REFUSED TO TAKE

New Line’s chairman wanted the film’s vampire hierarchy shown visually at the moment of death: important vampires exploding into diamonds, lower-ranked “familiars” dissolving into something closer to waste. Norrington refused the note. The studio also pushed to trim the opening blood rave sequence as too much for a mainstream release. Norrington kept it in full, reportedly angry enough that other executives called his agent to calm him down, and the scene became the film’s most quoted moment.

He extended the same instinct to the action itself, letting Snipes, a trained martial artist, perform much of his own fight choreography rather than leaning on obvious doubling or heavy stylisation. It gives the film’s physical scenes a grounded quality the sequels moved away from.

THE REWATCH

THE FILM THAT MADE THE GENRE SAFE TO TRY AGAIN

Blade opened a year after Batman & Robin (1997) was savaged by critics and audiences alike, at a moment when comic-book adaptations looked like a bad commercial bet. On a $45 million budget, an R-rated film built around a character most audiences had never heard of opened at number one and went on to earn $131.2 million worldwide. Retrospective writers now credit it directly with clearing the runway for Fox’s X-Men, which arrived less than two years later and took the genre fully mainstream.

Contemporary reviews were split in a way that previews its cult reputation: Rotten Tomatoes lists a 59% critics’ score against a 78% audience score, and Metacritic’s aggregate sits at 47. Critics who liked the style and the action while questioning the plot mechanics were, in effect, describing the exact split that turned the film into a rewatch favourite rather than a forgotten one.

One correction worth making here: Stan Lee did not create Blade. The character was created by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan, first appearing in Tomb of Dracula #10 in July 1973. Lee did film a small cameo for this film, as a police officer arriving at the blood rave’s aftermath, but it was cut before release for reasons nobody involved ever confirmed on the record. His first surviving Marvel movie cameo ended up being X-Men two years later instead.

For a first watch, Blade is the earliest stop on the Marvel movies in release order guide, the list that runs from here through X-Men, Iron Man and the rest of the connected multiverse to today’s slate.