Wesley Snipes Felt That ‘Blade’ Was Treated Like the ‘Ugly Step-Child’ of Superhero Films
Actor Wesley Snipes feels that he and his Blade films contributed a lot to the superhero genre of films. And he was disappointed when those contributions seemed to go highly unnoticed.
Wesley Snipes believed only a few communities gave ‘Blade’ the respect it deserved
Snipes didn’t feel that Blade was given its just due for its influence over the film industry. Even Snipes seemed to underestimate just how big the Blade franchise would be when he was cast.
“In the beginning, my motivation for doing the first Blade project was to have fun and to do something I knew my homeboys and homegirls would absolutely love. The ones from the martial arts world. The ones from the Shaft world, and the ones who love Kung-fu and all that. We knew that would be attractive to that niche audience, but I had no idea it would have broader appeal. However, it was a good lesson. It taught us what was possible,” Snipes once told Comicbookmovie.com.
Director Bassam Tariq, who was tapped for Mahershala Ali’s Blade reboot, credited Snipes for kick-starting the sub-genre.
“What’s exciting about the film that we’re making is [there] hasn’t been a canon for Blade, as we’re reading through the comics and everything,” Tariq told IndieWire not too long ago. “Him being a daywalker is the one thing that’s been established, and you know we can’t deny what Wesley Snipes did, which was he basically got this whole ball rolling. A Black man created the superhero world that we’re in, that’s just the truth.”
But at one point, Snipes felt many didn’t agree with Tariq’s assessment.
“Some people forget or overlook my/our contribution to this current trend,” Snipes once told IGN. “The ‘Gaming’ community knows and the streets give us credits, but the movie world frequently plays us like the ‘ugly step child’ or the ‘kitchen help,’ especially when the conversation revolves around the ‘boys in tights’ or ‘the bat’.”
Wesley Snipes wanted to play Black Panther before playing Blade
Before Blade, Snipes had his sights set on another black superhero in Black Panther. He’d been trying to get his own Black Panther movie off the ground for some time.
“I think Black Panther spoke to me because he was noble, and he was the antithesis of the stereotypes presented and portrayed about Africans, African history and the great kingdoms of Africa,” Snipes once told The Hollywood Reporter. “It had cultural significance, social significance. It was something that the black community and the white community hadn’t seen before.”
Snipes would meet with several prominent figures in the film industry to bring Black Panther to the big screen. This included John Singleton, who wanted to make certain changes to the character that Snipes was uncomfortable with.
“John was like, ‘Nah! Hah! Hah! See, he’s got the spirit of the Black Panther, but he is trying to get his son to join the [civil rights activist] organization. And he and his son have a problem, and they have some strife because he is trying to be politically correct and his son wants to be a knucklehead,’” Snipes recalled. “I am loosely paraphrasing our conversation. But ultimately, John wanted to take the character and put him in the civil rights movement.”
Snipes simply couldn’t find the right people to make a Black Panther film work. But he took what he learned from the experience and applied it to Blade.
“It was a natural progression and a readjustment,” Snipes said. “They both [Black Panther and Blade] had nobility. They both were fighters. So I thought, hey, we can’t do the King of Wakanda and the Vibranium and the hidden kingdom in Africa, let’s do a black vampire.”
Wesley Snipes was looking forward to reprising his role as Blade
Mahershala Ali has been tapped to play the new Blade in a rebooted film that will take place within the MCU. But before Snipes was replaced, the actor suggested that there were already talks of returning to the franchise himself. He also shared that his potential Blade sequel would be next level compared to his prior films.
“All the main execs [at Marvel] and my team, we’ve been discussing for the past two years. Everyone’s enthusiastic about it, everybody gets it. But they got a business to run and they gotta square the things that they gotta figure out before they can get to it, I guess. In the meantime, we got a business to run and our own slate of things to do so,” he once told Vice. “But the next time you see something in [the Blade universe], mark my words: what we did before is child’s play compared to what we can do now.”
