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About 90 percent of the enjoyment in Deadpool & Wolverine hinges on knowing references about the recent history of Hollywood and the current state of superhero movies. And none of those winking asides hit as hard as the moment where Blade, played once again by Wesley Snipes, does something cool, looks at the camera, and says, “There’s only been one Blade. There’s only gonna be one Blade.”
As always, the Daywalker is correct, as it was announced that Marvel will no longer continue to try and ice skate uphill. The long in-development and beleaguered Blade film starring Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali has been taken off Disney’s release schedule and likely shelved. Which might be exactly what the MCU needs right now.
Yes, the once premiere franchise in Hollywood did get a huge bump from Deadpool & Wolverine, just like it did from Spider-Man: No Way Home. But those are less narrative films and more nostalgia-fests filled with celebrities reprising famous and infamous roles (or almost roles, in the case of Channing Tatum). If producer Kevin Feige keeps going back to these familiar places, the MCU threatens to become a blockbuster equivalent of The Brady Bunch Hour or Circus of the Stars, glitzy events that offer celebrity appearances and nothing else.
Of course, the very fact that Ali used his Oscar cred to call for a movie shows that the Blade film didn’t intend to simply reheat what Snipes did in the late ’90s and early 2000s. In fact, reports indicated that Ali wanted something much more grand in theme and scale than any of the action programmers that Snipes made. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Snipes wanted Blade to rival Black Panther in terms of scale and importance. Screenwriters hired for the project ran the gamut from X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo to True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, all of whom pitched moody period pieces set in New Orleans or dense lore stories involving the mythical Lilith.
As discussed earlier here at Den of Geek, that approach always seemed wrong-headed. Look, we’re living in the world in which an overstuffed animated movie about Spider-Men from around the multiverse is also a heartfelt tale of a boy coming into his own. With the right creative team, any character can be used to tell any type of story. But also… Blade’s kinda just a dude who kills vampires. He debuted as a supporting character in a Dracula book from the 1970s and has only intermittently carried his own series, even after the films raised his profile.
Now, to be fair, Black Panther wasn’t exactly the richest character either. His best stories came in the 1990s when Christopher Priest and Reginald Hudlin (incidentally, the first Black writers to shepherd the character since his debut in 1966) took over his solo book. But his movie came from Ryan Coogler, a director with uncanny blockbuster sensibilities. Coogler wisely surrounded T’Challa with other, arguably richer characters, to ground his story in a personal journey.
And even Coogler’s talents couldn’t hold up under the massive Marvel Machine, which suffocated all of the communal sadness and hope of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever with universe building from La Contessa Valentina Allegra de la Fontaine and Everett K. Ross. In other words, it’s really, really hard to turn a fairly one-note character into something rich and compelling enough to carry a blockbuster film and, you know, be a cultural phenomenon. Nothing about reports from Marvel’s doomed Blade development suggests it was heading in a direction to pull that ambition off, making the movie’s removal from the slate something of a mercy.
That mercy is especially true in light of the current state of the MCU. While bringing back Robert Downey Jr. and the Russos did get some eyes back on the MCU, it also disappointed those who wanted to see characters already introduced get some more screen time. With Destin Daniel Cretton stepping away from Avengers 5 and 6, Shang-Chi may not get the leading role he could have had, despite the fact that he starred in one of the more successful origin stories of late. Will Downey Jr.’s presence and multiverse shenanigans mean that Sam Wilson doesn’t get to continue his story as Captain America and leader of the Avengers? Is Monica Rambeau just shunted off to X-Men world, never again to be seen?
The MCU has enough compelling characters to continue the universe without Iron Man and Steve Rogers. They just need better projects. Blade would never have been one of those projects. Like its central character, both human and vampire, Ali’s Blade film would have been both a standalone project with a new character and part of a larger filmic lineage. While being a hybrid makes Blade himself stronger, the movie seemed to collapse under the contradictions.
The sun has set on the Daywalker. Hopefully, Marvel can devote those same resources to building a compelling movie for one of their other great characters, one who can move the franchise forward instead of backward.
The post Blade Release Date Cancelation Is a Good Thing for Marvel appeared first on Den of Geek.
