Although it wasn’t marketed as a comic book movie, 1998’s Blade convinced Hollywood that there was money to be made from Marvel.
As director Stephen Norrington rolled cameras on his bloodthirsty action horror Blade in 1997, a war was raging outside. Marvel Entertainment, the company which owned the rights to the Blade comic book character, was in the midst of a lengthy courtroom battle that would decide its direction over the next few years.
Having spent much of the early 1990s facing oblivion after the market for comic books and trading cards collapsed, Marvel began to look further afield for new ways of bringing in revenue. To this end, cigar-smoking company boss Ron Perelman greenlit Marvel Studios, a business arm dedicated to getting the wider firm’s comic book characters on the big screen.
To do so, Perelman wanted to merge Marvel Entertainment with ToyBiz, a manufacturer it already had a considerable stake in, reasoning that doing so would strengthen the business as a whole. Marvel’s shareholders disagreed, and a huge court case ensued, with Perelman on one side and Marvel investor Carl Icahn on the other. The whole saga was complex and messy, with the financial press picking over every barbed comment and turn of events.
Not that any of this had much impact on Blade, a movie based on a comic book character first introduced by Marvel Comics in 1973. It was the first movie produced under the Marvel Studios banner, with the production itself licenced out to New Line Cinema. There, screenwriter David S Goyer lobbied hard to get involved with the project, which would prove to be pivotal – his work on the likes of Dark City and The Crow: City Of Angels proved that he had the right sensibility for the full-blooded source material. Unlike so many people working in Hollywood at the time, Goyer also had a passion for comic books, and actively fought against New Line’s initial plans to turn Blade into something more comedic – “almost a spoof” was how he once described it.
With Blade – real name Eric Brooks – a much less known quantity than Spider-man or the Hulk, Goyer was free to take a few liberties with the character as presented in the comic book. “In the comic books, Blade was never half-human, half-vampire,” Goyer told Cinefantastique magazine in 2002. “He was human. There are plenty of other things that were changed as well. The basic premise I took was that Blade’s mother was bitten by a vampire when she was pregnant and, because of that, he has grown up with this crusade of his… A project like Blade, unlike a character like Spider-man, brings with it more latitude.”
Key to Blade’s future was undoubtedly Wesley Snipes, who brought all of his natural charisma and talent as a physical performer to his sword-wielding daywalker. Then there was the intriguing creative choice of hiring Stephen Norrington, a British filmmaker in his early 30s whose only previous feature was 1994’s Death Machine – a low-budget, Terminator-esque sci-fi film starring Brad Dourif.
Although it wasn’t a hit, New Line’s bosses clearly saw something in that film’s febrile cutting and inventive effects (Norrington previously worked on the SFX for the likes of Aliens). “Steven Norrington had made one very small film that very few people had seen,” Goyer said in 2002, “but we liked the fact that he had this kind of insane, crazed energy, and that he was coming out of left field and wasn’t the usual choice… because of that, he elevated what in a way was a glorified B-movie.”
Made for $45m and released in August 1998, Blade was an unexpectedly sizable hit – such that it even seemed to take New Line and Marvel by surprise. Here was a film based on a character largely unknown to most members of the public, and made by a studio that wasn’t exactly confident that it would find an audience (an earlier test screening hadn’t gone down well). Far from sinking without trace, Blade went to number one in the US and several regions in Europe, and eventually made a shade over $130m globally.
Read more: Blade | A brief history of Marvel’s troubled reboot
The success of Blade roughly coincided with the conclusion of Marvel’s legal in-fighting as 1998 drew to a close. ToyBiz and Marvel Entertainment finally merged, but both Perelman and Icahn ultimately lost out; in the struggle for power, businessmen Isaac Perlmutter and Avi Arad, founders of Marvel Studios, emerged as the victors.
Arad, who’d long tried to convince the rest of Hollywood that there was money to be made out of Marvel’s characters, finally managed to get an X-Men movie going at 20th Century Fox as the decade ended. Although the project had been at the planning and scripting stage for years, Arad later argued that it was Blade that gave Fox the confidence to put X-Men into production.
“X-Men deserves a lot of credit, but I must give just as much credit to Norrington, David Goyer, and Wesley Snipes for Blade,” Arad told Cinefantastique in 2002. “No one would have made a movie the size of X-Men without looking at Blade and saying, ‘Whoa, wait a second. One hundred and fifty million box office worldwide on a character who is not totally known?’
“It wasn’t high budget, it wasn’t promoted well. It was promoted okay – New Line did a good job with it – but they didn’t expect it to open at $18m. That’s a big opening.”
Blade’s success would lead to two further films in 2002 and 2004, turning it into a trilogy, while X-Men, which went on to make almost $300m on its release in 2000, launched an entire franchise of sequels and spin-offs.
The irony was, as New Line and Fox saw millions of dollars roll in, Marvel barely saw any profits at all. It earned a small percentage from X-Men’s box office takings; for Blade, it received a flat fee of just $25,000.
Nevertheless, Blade proved to be a key to Marvel’s future in the film industry. In time, it would gradually buy back the characters it had sold off to other companies over the years – the likes of Iron Man, Black Widow, Hulk and more besides. Then, in 2003, came the idea of making movies based on those characters in-house, rather than licencing the work out to other studios. Before long, the Marvel Cinematic Universe would be born, spearheaded by the release of Iron Man in 2008.
The financial oblivion of the 1990s must have seemed like a distant memory by the late 2000s. But in a further twist of irony, later attempts to bring Blade back to the screen have all faltered in the years since. A new movie, with Mahershala Ali taking over from Wesley Snipes as the daywalker, was grandly announced in 2019, but to date, nothing concrete has emerged.
At present, it looks as though the earliest we’ll see a new Blade will be 2026 – some 30 years after work began on the movie that started it all.
