Marvel Studios
Wesley Snipes’ ‘Blade’ was key to the beginning of the MCU, according to Kevin Feige
The superhero genre went into a boom when ‘Blade’ and ‘X-Men’ were released in 1998 and 2000 respectively, and their impact on Marvel can still be felt.
‘Iron Man’ marked the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 with a film that not everyone was betting on but that gave rise to a shared universe of films - and more recently series - that has achieved several box office records worldwide. But beyond the success of Marvel Studios for more than a decade, there was a time when the superhero genre suffered both in terms of quality and revenue; until the arrival of ‘Blade’ in 1998 and ‘X-Men’ in 2000, two films that had a great impact and that marked the way forward for Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios.
The impact of Wesley Snipes’ ‘Blade’ for Marvel Studios
Kevin Feige explained why the ‘Blade’ movie with Wesley Snipes was so important for the future birth of Marvel Studios and the MCU, a key era for the superhero genre that would shortly after receive another great impact with ‘X-Men’: “I said for a long time that the one-two punch for Marvel, pre-dating me, was Blade and then X-Men. Blade was a character that nobody knew from the comics, or very few people knew. It wasn’t advertised as being from Marvel Comics,” comments Feige.
He continued: “X-Men was the No. 1 bestselling comic for the 15 years before the movie came out. Both of them did extremely well, and that instilled in us the notion that it is less about how many issues did you sell or how famous was the animated show or the live-action series in the ‘70s, but how engaging can you make the character, and how much of a new experience of a world can you bring to cinemas with that character. And that’s what we tried to do with Iron Man, Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy.”
Blade was a an almost unknown character until his movie, which practically no one identified with Marvel even after its theatrical release. The X-Men, for their part, were very famous, but that did not stop the vampire hunter from achieving a warmer reception by critics and the public comparable to that of the X-Men in the cinema.
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