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This article contains Deadpool & Wolverine spoilers.
As is typical of the one they call the Daywalker, Blade is unimpressed. In the front seats of an abused and debased Honda Odyssey, two of his superpowered colleagues are jabbering about variants, different versions of the same characters, and all those other multiversal nonsense things that’s made superhero movies a chore in the 2020s.
“That’s Punisher’s AT4,” Jennifer Garner’s Elektra says about the glorified rocket launcher resting snugly in Wesley Snipes’ arms. “Which Punisher?” quips Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool, “there’s been like five of them?”
That is when Snipes gets the line of the movie, at least where vampire killers are concerned. “There’s only been one Blade,” grimaces the man in the sunglasses. “There’s only going to be one Blade.” In the same beat, Deadpool slowly turns to look dead into the camera lens. The Merc with the Mouth breaking the fourth wall is, of course, nothing new. And yet, what is striking about this moment is the fact our motormouth merc stays conspicuously silent. Presumably it’s a pause common in comedy, with the players leaving space for the audience to laugh—mine certainly did. But the unusual restraint of Reynolds’ alter-ego spoke volumes all the same.
Now, less than five months later and after the movie arrived on Disney+, he looks as if he is virtually singing.
It has been no secret since the release of Deadpool & Wolverine that Reynolds—an actor who once allegedly enjoyed a frosty relationship with Snipes after working with him on Blade: Trinity 20 years ago—has seen any such awkwardness thaw. The two appeared on stage together laughing at San Diego Comic-Con the same day Deadpool & Wolverine opened in theaters, and in the days and weeks after the film’s badly kept secret about Snipes’ cameo was blown, Reynolds seemed to even go so far as to openly campaign on Snipes’ behalf by encouraging fans to request another Blade movie starring Wesley Snipes from Marvel Studios.
“The reaction when [Wesley Snipes] enters the movie is the most intense thing I’ve heard in a theater,” Reynolds wrote on social media in August about Snipes’ first shot in Deadpool 3. “People screaming with uninhibited joy and love is also the sound of a legacy. More Blade please. #DayWalker. A Logan-style send off, specifically.”
All of this vocal support for Snipes was striking considering that around the same time Marvel Studios was still apparently developing a rebooted Blade movie set in the mainline Marvel Cinematic Universe starring Mahershala Ali—a film that is supposed to have been a long time coming. Indeed, I was there in Hall H in 2019 when, more than five years ago, the two-time Oscar winner coming onstage to adorn a Blade baseball cap next to Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was the mic drop crescendo of the evening. The Daywalker was back and with a new highly respected face!
Half a decade later, that movie has never materialized despite directors coming and going, as well as writers and co-stars. Snipes even gave it his polite and respectful blessing. He told Den of Geek in 2021 that he’d messaged Ali to “go rock it baby.”
That opportunity obviously never came about, and the current official word on Marvel’s Blade is that the company is going to start over developing what the Daywalker might even look like in the MCU after taking the seemingly abandoned Ali version of the film officially off its calendar. (It was previously scheduled to release in November 2025.)
Which brings us back to the line in Deadpool & Wolverine. Was Snipes’ seeming dig at Marvel trying to reboot and recast one of his signature roles a wink at the studio or a shot across the bow? And was Reynolds’ circumspect gaze into Camera B an allusion to the fact Marvel already knew the then still officially developing Blade movie was DOA, or even perhaps a bit of fan-pleasing sentiment from an actor publicly supportive of getting Snipes back in the leather trench coat for more than a handful of scenes?
The ambiguity of the gag is left open to interpretation. The decisions which inform the Marvel Studios release slate happen well above even Reynolds’ sizable pay grade, and there is a very likely scenario where Deadpool’s silence was intended to age in whichever direction Feige and other executives under the Disney umbrella ultimately elected to go. If Ali’s Blade film actually was able to meet a 2025 or 2026 release date, the Deadpool scene could have eventually been remembered as a knowing wink and a nudge. Think “oh, I’m not going to tell him, are you?”
But if that’s the case, the Mouse House wound up doing exactly what Reynolds, and it would seem the O.G. Blade, would prefer: leaving the character as exclusively part of Wesley Snipes’ legacy. In which case, the stage would be set to do something akin to what Reynolds suggested on social media: letting Snipes have one last ride in vampire-killing. In which case, it would seem the one and only Blade has already had the last laugh.
Deadpool & Wolverine is streaming on Disney+ now.
The post Deadpool & Wolverine’s Best Blade Joke Already Aged Like Fine Red Wine appeared first on Den of Geek.
