Movies
Blade and David Fincher’s take on the ‘90s classic
An unknown vision of Blade that its director brings to light several decades later.
Blade, the 1998 film starring Wesley Snipes, is a classic of its time, a Marvel Comics antihero who is a human-vampire hybrid who protects humans by hunting vampires. The film was directed by David S. Goyer, but what not many know is that he originally developed the film with acclaimed director David Fincher, known for films like Seven, Fight Club, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, among many others. At the time, Fincher was coming off a bad experience with his first directorial effort, Alien 3, a movie that was poorly received by critics. At the last moment, the acclaimed director would drop out of directing Blade, but Goyer still remembers how he approached the movie and how it stuck in his mind.
Goyer recalled Fincher’s vision for Blade on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “There was this giant conference table, and Fincher had laid out 40, 50 books of photography and art that were just open with post-it notes in them, and he just said, ‘This is the movie,’ and took us on a two-hour tour around the table of this is the aesthetic, this is the vibe for this scene, that scene, this character, that scene, and It was such a fully fleshed out visual pitch. There’s not question that some of that thinking -- because I had never seen something like that before -- that a lot of that thinking then infused my further revisions and informed my further revisions. Surely there were plot points as well, but I remember that being fundamental to me.”
Blade and its release at a difficult time for Marvel
We are living one of the best moments in Marvel’s history, but at the time of Blade’s release it was a dark time, very dark for the house of ideas. It was bankrupt and selling its characters to studios like New Line Cinema (Blade), 20th Century Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four) and Sony Pictures (Spider-Man) helped it stay afloat. Most of these licenses are back with Marvel Studios, and Blade itself is getting a long-awaited reboot of a license that once scared Marvel with its crude and adult approach, but ended up being a huge success.