Beau DeMayo has been one of the writers on Marvel’s troubled big screen Blade reboot – and he has pointers on where things are going wrong.
Whilst nothing official has yet been said, there are rumours suggesting that Marvel Studios may finally have found a Blade script that it is happy with. Should that be the case (and we’ll believe that one only when production begins) then it will mark the conclusion of a harrowing pre-production phase for a project which – for Blade fans – probably feels like it could have been far simpler.
After all, it’s not like Marvel Studios is looking to make Citizen Kane. The simplicity of the 1998 original film starring Wesley Snipes was one of its strengths, with the film establishing a foundation that the Marvel Cinematic Universe would eventually build on to achieve unparalleled box office success over dozens of interconnected films.
Somewhere though, Marvel Studios seems to have overcomplicated things, especially if the claims we heard a while ago about one draft seeing Blade being relegated to a supporting character in his own movie are true. One of the project’s writers, Beau DeMayo, is no longer employed by Marvel and has decided to talk about the process of trying to crack a Blade script that the studio would get behind.
DeMayo was fired after his work on the well-liked animated show X-Men ’97, while several of his Blade drafts were ultimately rejected by the studio’s executives. DeMayo has opened up a little about that process and it’s pretty clear that he also feels that Marvel is in a mess of their own making with the project.
Read more: Blade | How the 1998 hit paved the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Speaking on X, DeMayo said: “Take a John Wick movie. Give mobsters fangs. Swap Keanu for Ali [Mahershala, the film’s star] , hand him a sword, not a daughter who makes him fret over swinging the hero’s name. Wick cost $20 million to make. Add $10 million for vampire/Darkhold magic VFX, you have $30-40 million Marvel movie. I don’t get why it’s been so hard. Studio’s broken.”
The writer even went as far as offering a few details on one of his three drafts that had been rejected, adding:
“My favorite was a The Raid-style treatment where Blade finds himself defending a rundown tenement of humans from Varney’s vamp hordes until daylight. [It] took place over one night Blade learns from tenant Jericho Drumm that Varney’s attacking because the female tenant who Blade sorta fancies has been magically impregnated with Lilith by tenants who’re secretly Darkhold Cultists. Think 30 Days Of Night meets Rosemary’s Baby.”
Mahershala Ali and Mia Goth are still attached to the film, but there’s no announced director since Yann Demange left the project.
A cut-price spin on The Raid would have definitely worked for us – Dredd was along those lines, even though it wasn’t following The Raid – but given that Marvel Studios is likely trying to get the supernatural corner of its cinematic universe up and running, the film we get will probably be more expansive. Which also means more expensive and therefore more risk-averse. We’ll let you know more regarding Blade when we hear it.
Read more: Blade | A brief history of Marvel’s troubled reboot
