Bringing Blade into the MCU is proving hard for Marvel, but the signs were there all along
Jun. 18, 2024Opinion | Can Marvel effectively fit Blade into the MCU?
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Bladeis one of the coolest superhero movies ever made, point blank period, and I stand by this. It’s a bold claim, but without Stephen Norrington’s 1998 horror-superhero flick, we might not have a Marvel Cinematic Universe – or, at the very least, Marvel movies would look a whole lot different.
Fast forward some 26 years later, Marvel is now planning a redo in order to introduce Blade as a new hero in the MCU. In some ways, this felt inevitable – though the studio has definitely been taking its sweet time reintroducing staples like the X-Men and TheFantastic Fourinto the MCU.
A cursed timeline
It’s not particularly difficult to connect the dots on why this could be having trouble, and why I’m terrified for the end result: it’s ostensibly a superhero-horror film following a movie and comic book series that are both frequently deeply dark and bone-crunching-ly violent that has to somehow work under Marvel’s definition of an R rating.
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Deadpool 3has the MCU’s first R rating, sure, but – if we’re judging by Deadpool and Deadpool 2 – most of that would appear to be for crude humor and some arguably mild neck-snapping violence. The original Blade begins with a blood rave, where gallons upon gallons of blood spray from fire sprinklers on the ceiling of a vampire-only nightclub. There’s a scene where they quite literally torture and burn the flesh of a blob-like vampire named Pearl by way of UV light. And what about revenants, the grotesque, zombie-like result of a vampire bite gone wrong? What about the horrific way vampires burn alive when exposed to sunlight?
I’m not suggesting that the new film be a shot-for-shot remake of the first, nor would I expect it to be, but I am saying that the jarring, grotesque nature of Blade is part of what makes it really, really cool. Blade’s comic book character origins begin in 1929 London, with his original weapons of choice being daggers made of teakwood with a color palette similar to a Teenage Mutant. The 1998 film reimagines Blade as a Detroit native who ends up in a vampire-populated Los Angeles and has a gun packed with hollow silver bullets that are filled with garlic. This worked well with the sleek, dark superhero style of the ‘90s a laThe Crow,or even Tim Burton’s Batman; it was a modern update that fit the genre at the time.
Now, I can’t imagine that Marvel would cancel a movie that’s technically already in production (though scrapped sequels are definitely a thing), so if we’re moving full speed ahead with an MCU version of Blade, I just hope in my heart of hearts that they land on the right director-writer team.
Indeed, there is a way to get the Blade movie right – it just might take a bit of a risk to get there. And look, while it may seem like a bad thing that we’ve lost several directors along the way, I for one am glad that the MCU is taking its time to get this one right. After all, Blade has always been a shadowy figure for Marvel, it’s only right that it takes some time to nail him down.
Lauren Milici is a Senior Entertainment Writer for GamesRadar+ currently based in the Midwest. She previously reported on breaking news for The Independent’s Indy100 and created TV and film listicles for Ranker. Her work has been published in Fandom, Nerdist, Paste Magazine, Vulture, PopSugar, Fangoria, and more.
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