Analysis

 Brett Browning

Professor Whaley

ENG-3460-0001

November 29 2023

Adaption of Blade

Comic book movies are incredibly popular in today’s media. With movies from the MCU being pumped out and being well received, it’s hard to avoid them online. With Marvel being the word of mouth these days, it begs the question: How exactly did it happen? A lot of people would point to the first MCU movie, Iron Man (2008), but that’s not exactly the case. The true cause of the MCU would Marvel’s 1998 movie, Blade. While comic book movies are popular nowadays, Blade helped pave the way for the popularity of those movies today

Blade is a comic book character owned by Marvel Comics who first debuted in 1973. His first appearance would be The Tomb of Dracula, tenth issue (Dixon). What’s interesting about his first appearance is that he was technically a secondary character. The main character of the Tomb of Dracula line was in fact, Dracula, and largely focused on him as a whole. In Blade’s first appearance, his attire and personality is similar to Luke Cage, another popular black male superhero. They’re both hyper masculine figures with distinguished costumes and both possess a no-nonsense attitude. Blade would be a recurring character in The Tomb of Dracula series, but wouldn’t have his own solo series until 1994. Blade officially landed his own solo miniseries that ran for about ten issues from 1994 to 1995 (Holte). It wasn’t until the release of the titular character’s movie that Blade managed to reach mainstream popularity in the late 1990s to the early 2000s. But why would Marvel choose Blade, a rather obscure comic book superhero, for a movie adaption in 1998? 

Marvel was going bankrupt in the 1990s. It may seem hard to believe nowadays with Marvel raking in billions with the MCU movies, but at a point in time they had almost gone bankrupt. Although their are many different factors involved in this, a lot of people tend to point to the two main factors in it all, Ron Perelman and Carl Ichan. Ron Perelman and Carl Ichan were both financiers competing for control over Marvel comics. Eventually, Perelman won control over Marvel comics by purchasing the company for 82.5 million dollars in 1989 (Calandro). Perelman had quickly set off to improve and build a diverse youth entertainment company. Perelman had sunk money into trading cards and action figures in order to turn a big profit. The financial strategy had proven to be successful, for a short time. The quick, speculative boom of trading cards and comics had quickly fallen off, and Marvel faced serious loss and debt. By this time, Marvel quickly auctioned off the rights to their comic characters to movie studios in the hopes it would turn a profit. 

The rights to Blade were eventually sold to New Line Cinema, and director Stephen Dorrington was to take the helm. Blade was quite a gamble for Marvel to take at the time. Comic book movies weren’t as popular back then as they are nowadays, and around the time before Blade was released didn’t help the image. With Blade (1998) riding off of the tailcoats of terrible comic book movies such as Batman and Robin, Spawn, and Steel, Blade had to perform well at the box office in order to turn a profit. Luckily, Blade was a major hit at the box office and was well received from general audiences. Even receiving this compliment from Roger Erbet, “Blade is a movie that relishes high visual style. It uses the extreme camera angles, the bizarre costumes and sets, the exaggerated shadows, the confident cutting between long shots and extreme closeups. It slams ahead in pure visceral imagery" (Dixon). The success of Blade not only saved Marvel from bankruptcy, but also paved the way for many other superhero movies to come. Blade proved to audiences that superhero comic book movies could be so much more than what was being produced at the time. It allowed the audience to experience more adult storytelling that appealed to everyone. This would allow movies such as X-Men and Spider-man to build off of this idea for their movies. 

After the massive success of Blade, a sequel was planned by Marvel. Eventually, Blade 2 would release in 2002 to critical success. Blade 2 made even more money in the box office than its predecessor. Despite critics not liking Blade 2, the audience loved the movie and a third sequel was going to be in development. Unfortunately, Blade: Trinity was a less than successful movie. Blade: Trinity had a troubled production, with Wesley Snipes and director David S. Goyer constantly butting heads with each other. There’s even a point in the movie where the production team had to CGI Wesley Snipes’ eyes open because he refused to open them himself (Dixon). Thus, the movie underperformed and was panned by both critics and audiences alike. The Blade trilogy had come to end, but it wouldn’t be the last time we saw Blade. In 2006, SpikeTV had produced a TV series titled Blade: The Series. This series would be a follow up to the movies and would follow Blade (played by rapper Sticky Fingaz) hunting vampires. The series only lasted for a season that had a total of 13 episodes. 

In conclusion, while comic book movies are popular nowadays, Blade helped pave the way for the popularity of those movies today. While Blade was a relatively obscure comic book character, even by comic book readers, he managed to do the impossible. Blade managed to save the company of Marvel from the verge of bankruptcy and keep them financially stable. Not only that, but also pioneered modern comic book movies. It put comic book movies back on the radar of people’s interest. It managed to show that comic book movies could be taken seriously, and tell an adult story without having to pull any punches. Without Blade, movies such as X-Men, Spider-Man, and even the MCU wouldn’t be possible without Blade.

Works Cited

Calandro, Joseph, Jr. “Distressed M&A and Corporate Strategy: Lessons.” Proquest, 2011,
www.proquest.com/docview/194376253. Accessed 15 October 2023

Calandro, Joseph,Jr. "M&A deal-making: Disney, Marvel and the value of “hidden assets”." 

Strategy & Leadership, vol. 47, no. 3, 2019, pp. 34-39. ProQuest, http://login.proxy.lib.uiowa.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/m-amp-deal-making-disney-marvel-value-hidden/docview/2241247277/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-02-2019-0023. Accessed 15 October 2023

Dixon, Wheeler  Winston, and Richard Graham. “The Marvel Universe.” SpringerLink, Springer
International Publishing, 17 Nov. 2016,
link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-47184-6_3. Accessed 17 October 2023

Holte, James Craig (2001) "Blade: A Return to Revulsion," Journal of Dracula Studies: Vol. 3 , 

Article 5.https://research.library.kutztown.edu/dracula-studies/vol3/iss1/5/?utm_source=research.library.kutztown.edu%2Fdracula-studies%2Fvol3%2Fiss1%2F5&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages. Accessed 14 October 2023