WHAT? IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE BLADE HIT THEATERS
Ok, let’s just get this out of the way. Blade rocked. It was good. It was even better than good, though maybe not all the Blade movies could be called amazing. But the first film was twenty fucking years ago. It’s been two DECADES since a black man, Wesley Snipes, appeared as an anti-hero hero. A daywalking, vampiric, taciturn asshole hero. So as everyone runs around loving Black Panther, which is fine, let’s all remember that there was already a footprint of a black man as hero film franchise that did well.
BLADE WAS FIRST MARVEL UNIVERSE SUCCESS WITH BLACK HERO
One thing that does separate the two is that Black Panther has a mostly black cast and the director is black as well. Blade was mostly black because of the lead character, played by Snipes. Mostly. But the first film with a black lead from the Marvel universe was…… Blade. Twenty years ago! Why did it take so long to get to Black Panther? Snipes talked about his perspective on that recently. Evidently, studio heads just didn’t understand how a movie about a black vampire could do well at the box office. Snipes said:
I remember, one of the executives of the studio at the time, in the screening, commented after they did the focus group, and they got back the numbers, and they saw how the numbers was so high, and there was so much appeal for the character and the world, he commented, ‘I don’t understand why people like this.’
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WESLEY SNIPES REFERRED TO RYAN REYNOLDS AS “THAT CRACKER”
They liked it because it was great fun. It was different. They liked the second Blade because, well, great cast and Guillermo del Toro. Bang. Zoom. But then you’ve got the third Blade movie (Trinity) where Snipes was the wrong kind of diva in production. I mean, seriously, what kind of dick refers to co-star Ryan Reynolds as “that cracker?” Wesley, that’s who. Oh, and Snipes also sued New Line Cinema, writer-director David Goyer and Toby Emmerich for $5 million, saying they violated his contract. Because they’re why the movie sucked. Right.
SNIPES LOOKS FOR LOVE WITH BLACK POPULARITY AFTER FEDERAL PRISON, BLAMING EVERYONE ELSE
Of course, Wesley Snipes also sued the IRS. But that was after 3 years in a fed resort in Pennsylvania for failing to file his taxes for three years. So why is it again, that it took so long to get a major blockbuster movie with a black lead from the Marvel universe? Maybe because Wesley Snipes is an asshole who shat the bed and robbed us of a franchise that should have been. But you do notice, don’t you, that he’s jumping on the coattails today? Too bad nobody wants to work with him.
