What the Heck Should Marvel Do About Blade?

Once people began hearing rumbles of the plethora of cameos and guest stars in Deadpool & Wolverine, you could practically hear the engine start running as discussions brewed about which should stick around beyond this movie. Marvel hasn’t made a call either way on basically any of them, it seems, but that hasn’t stopped Ryan Reynolds from trying to get the ball rolling on at least one of the big supporting players.

Recently, Reynolds took to Instagram to hype up Wesley Snipes’ record-breaking return as Blade, saying his arrival on the film “is the most intense thing l’ve heard in a theater. People screaming with uninhibited joy and love is also the sound of a legacy.” That would be a big, heartwarming deal on its own, given how their rocky relatinoship while filming Blade Trinity. But things escalated when Reynolds then called for “more Blade, please. A Logan-style sendoff specifically.” (Let’s play fair and pretend for a moment that said sendoff technically no longer counts because of this exact, billion dollar-grossing movie.)

Naturally, a statement like that gets minds a-buzzing, especially given a dig in the film proper where Snipes says there’s “only ever gonna be one Blade.” Marvel’s been trying to get a new version of the character off the ground in the movies for five years now, with Mahershala Ali tapped to play the role and given one single chance thus far to do it in a post-credits scene for Eternals. In the years since, progress on the Blade movie has gone…not well, to put it charitably, with the most recent setback being the departure of director Yann Demange back in June. The alleged film is basically a walking joke that stands as a sign of Marvel losing its juice once the Infinity Saga ended half a decade ago.

Put all that together, and yeah, the easiest thing to do would probably be to snag Snipes for an R-rated farewell. Audiences would turn up for it, and I’m pretty sure I would, particularly if they had a fight scene set to Crystal Method’s “Name of the Game.” Deadpool & Wolverine is proof enough that idea writes and sells itself, and no doubt Marvel would like to add another nostalgic win to its belt. At the same time, it speaks cynical volumes that a movie that has several jokes about its co-lead reprising his iconic role basically until he’s dead is now telling people heads that this should be standard operating procedure whenever studios start taking more hits than they’d like. Being overly focused on one or more characters has been a pain point for both Fox and the MCU, and doing that again with Blade doesn’t sound ideal at all.

As is the case with Star Wars, Marvel is currently figuring out how to reorient itself after an erratic couple of years. Another Blade flick with Snipes at the helm can’t erase the baggage of the MCU movie-to-be, to say nothing of making Ali and whatever remaining cast and crew look like a bunch of chumps. Can we not all agree that the sensible thing to do would be for Marvel to quit overcomplicating an action flick about a guy with a sword fighting vampires? Or alternatively, if we’re still committed to this multiverse business, just have the two versions team up in a buddy cop movie called Blades and kill two suckheads with one stone?

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