Wesley Snipes’ unexpected announcement that he’d been working with Marvel Studios on a number of Blade projects, with a possibility of him reprising the role for the first time since 2004’s Blade: Trinity, was greeted with universal enthusiasm. The consensus was that there’s nobody that could play Blade quite like Snipes and people would love to see him rubbing shoulders with the rest of the MCU heroes. But, as I pointed out in my article announcing it, there’s the small problem that the actor’s 56-years-old and might be getting a little old to portray a (nearly) immortal half-vampire badass.
Now, ComicBook.com have laid out a convincing case that one of the projects he’s working on could be a resurrection of the unreleased Blade the Hunter comic book concept announced in 2015. The series focuses on Fallon Grey, a popular 16-year-old girl in Oregon who discovers that she’s Blade’s daughter. The rest of the series would have revolved around the fractious relationship between father and daughter as he prepares her for a life battling vampires and the pair coming to terms with their new familial relationship.
It’s a concept that sounds like it’d appeal to Marvel Studios’ thinking on legacy heroes and neatly solves the ‘old Blade’ problem. After all, this version of the character could plausibly be a grizzled veteran of countless vampire battles and play the same function in the narrative as Whistler did in the original film.
Granted, I’d much rather see an MCU Blade movie about… well, Blade, but this sounds like an interesting launchpad for a franchise within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Perhaps the only thing standing in its way is that the grizzled older man/young girl thing is a teeny bit played out at the moment, with Logan doing it about as well as it could be done.
After all this talk, though, I’m suddenly hungry for watching Wesley Snipes be a total badass carving up vampires, so I think I’m going to go sit down with Blade II. Here’s hoping that the next time I see him he’ll be striding purposefully through the darker corners of the MCU!