Blade: 25th Anniversary
Wesley Snipes is Blade in Blade (New Line Cinema).
Marvel’s bad ass vampire hunter helped save superhero movies.
Let’s travel back in time 25 years to the summer of 1998, back in the days when “summer movie season” meant something. Some phenomenal movies dropped that summer, movies like Saving Private Ryan and There’s Something About Mary. These movies are among the best in their respective genres, and they were hit movies that summer. There were other movies that weren’t as aclaimed, but they were entertaining, and they had high-profile casts that drew audiences to their local cinemas, mega hits, like The Mask of Zorro, and Armageddon, which was the top grossing movie of the season.
These five movies combined to bring in 1.6 billion USD at box offices that summer. They stirred the cultural milieu. Folks talked about them and quoted them. They were made to be hit movies, and they indeed were.
There was another movie that came out later in the summer of 1998, in the twilight weeks of the peak movie season, that ended up being a sneaky good popcorn hit. It wasn’t a high-profile blockbuster with an epic story and a well-known ensemble cast. It didn’t have a huge director behind it. No, this movie was a superhero flick that reinvented the main character and saved the comic book movie industry from collapse (for better and worse).
Blade took a barely known and rarely present Marvel superhero and introduced him to a global audience as a sleek, futuristic ninja-esque vampire hunter. It is a dark action movie that ushered in a tone and style that influenced several other hit action movies (looking at you, The Matrix). Not only did it do that, but it reinvented the comic book movie genre at a time when people didn’t give a shit about them. Less than a decade earlier, Tim Burton launched the genre with Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), two successful big screen adaptaions of a beloved superhero IP. However, Joel Schumacher’s two putrid Batman sequels (Batman Forever, 1995; Batman & Robin, 1997) managed to put future live-action movies on ice for several years. Calling Batman & Robin “trash” is an insult to garbage. Marvel’s attempts in the to bring its comic book heroes to the big screen, award-winning productions like Howard the Duck (1986), Captain America (1990), The Punisher, (1991) were even worse! Spawn and Steel (both released in 1997) nearly drove the final nail into the comic book movie genre’s coffin. Blade, ironically, brought the dead back to life.
Wesley Snipes was perfect in his role as Blade. He defined that character in the same way Harrison Ford did for Han Solo and Indiana Jones. You may try to separate the actor from the role with a fresh face, but you can’t replace the OG. Stephen Dorff (Deacon Frost, Donal Logue (Quinn), and Kris Kristofferson (Abraham Whistler) give great performances as their respective characters, and the rest of the production shines to deliver a movie of firsts: the first Marvel superhero movie with a Black hero lead; the first Marvel hit movie; and the first superhero movie to showcase some real grit and gore.
When we were kids, my younger brother and I would spend the last month of our summer break visiting our dad. Pops tended to live in desert communities, like Phoenix and Palm Springs He used to say that the desert was a place of inspiration for him, and he once claimed that he had a psychedlic experience somewhere out near Joshua Tree National Park back in the 70s that didn’t involve him taking any psychedlics. It was probably just smog. It was bad back then, but no one ever pressed him on it.
In the summer of ‘98, our dad was living in Palm Springs. The last month of our summer break was always August, so there we were—two teenage boys of 16 and 13—in toasty Palm Springs (CA). My brother and I had seen all the movies we wanted to see at a local $1 theater, where the air conditioner was…
Without most of the first world comforts we had at our mom’s house—video games, cable TV, reliable air conditioning—and because it was too damn hot even swim during the day, my bro and I were bored as hell most hours of the day. We couldn’t skateboard until after the sun went down and the temps dropped into the 90s. We played miniature golf a few times until we did some dumb teenage shit and got banned from Boomers, so there went that escape.
Besides the heat, the other thing about Palm Springs during the summer is that it is dead. All the tourists are gone, so it’s only the locals. My dad lived in a condo complex filled with timeshares. I lived with him for a year after I graduated high school, and I got experience what Palm Springs and the surrounding communities were like when all the snow birds flocked into the Coachella Valley for the holidays and spring break. I remembered all those summers my bro and I wished we could meet just one friend to kick it with and break up the monotony of our days. So, Blade came out at the perfect time, when I needed an entertaining, trouble-free escape.
I asked a girl, a local, one of the neghbors in the condo complex, if she wanted to go with me to see Blade, and we hit up a mid-week, mid-afternoon showing. That was around the time everyday when my dad would crank the thermostat to some intolerable setting, like 80 degrees, so it was no better time to sit in a chilly auditorium, with a cute girl no less.
Red Icees in hand, our own frozen cups of simulated blood to suck down during the vampire movie, we watched what was a surprisingly dope flick. I was impressed by the overall production of it, but it also introduced me to a Marvel hero I had no idea existed. I didn’t collect a lot of comic books back then, but I grew up with X-men and Spider-Man and Batman cartoons. I thought I knew who was who and what was what. The best lessons in life are the unexpected ones. I learned that day when I saw Blade that I didn’t know shit about superheroes or what a superhero movie could be.
Blade is still one of Marvel’s best movies and one of the best in the comic book movie genre. We celebrate its 25th anniversary with a little song, a little dance, and a deluge of blood.
