In 1998, this was pretty cool.
Today, superhero films rule the global box office.
This wasn't always the case.
There was one film that may have had
a hand in changing that, Blade.
Most people probably feel like the initial four color
films that made a significant impact are
Iron Man or one of the other initial raft of MCU films.
But that may not necessarily be true.
Going back even further, the two fisted onslaught of 2000's
X-Men and 2002's Spider-Man are more ubiquitously credited
as the initial foray that spawned the now seemingly
never ending series of big budget superhero movies
we keep seeing hit our screens.
But there's a group of people that believe that that may not
be right either.
Instead, there's a separate belief picking up
traction on the internet.
And that's that the 1998 Wesley Snipes vehicle, Blade,
directed by Steven Norrington and written by David S Goyer,
was truly the first comic book film
adaptation of the current era, establishing the tone, style,
and methodology that most big budget studio pictures based
on comic books now work from.
Is it true?
Cast your mind back to the mid 1990s, when this film was first
being discussed by New Line.
Comic book movies and video game movies
were the lowest of the low in terms of cultural respect.
Yes, obviously there was Batman '89 and Superman
the motion picture and a bevy of other films
that succeeded to varying degrees,
some critically, some financially, some neither.
But for every one that succeeded,
you had 15 Howard the Ducks or Double
Dragons or the Super Mario Bros movie.
But in the long run, its Blade that
had a secret weapon that none of those characters could claim,
obscurity.
Blade wasn't well known at all.
He wasn't a prestige character with a long lineage
of well regarded stories to adapt,
and it also wasn't a campy schlockfest.
It was a comic book movie that wanted to be taken seriously
without being hindered by the massive expectations
of common ubiquity, something none of its forebears
had even considered, let alone attempted.
In other words, it took the source material seriously,
even when so few understood the source material.
It wanted to ground Blade's world in our world.
This was actually at the time a deeply comic book idea.
Marvel's tagline for much of its publishing history
had been "the world outside your window."
And that was the same approach that Goyer and Norrington
took with our favorite vampire hunter.
Simply put, Blade was the first film
that made everyone sit up and take notice
of what a commercially viable genre comic book
adaptation could be.
If that little portion of this piece reminds you of anything,
it should remind you that when Iron Man the film released,
not but a little over a decade ago,
a lesson taken there being that Iron Man was definitely
not the most popular and well-known character
at the time.
People forget this.
But there was one big difference.
Blade released August 21, 1998.
It was produced off of a budget of $45 million
and generated over $131 million at the global box
office Blade's success was a little more surprising.
It's gritty black leather clad aesthetic and violent martial
arts themed action sequences helped the film stand out
killer tropes and cliches of what at the time
was a highly maligned subgenre.
And in some ways unlike Iron Man,
what allowed Blade the film to be so successful
is the massive reinvention of the titular character.
The film is actually based on a supporting character
in the 1973 Tomb of Dracula ongoing comic book
series created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan.
That's right, Blade literally didn't even
have its own comic book series.
He was a supporting monster hunter in a Dracula book.
This obviously positioned him as a D-list Marvel character
at best.
However, Goyer, a hard core comic book fan,
envisioned a new era of the character.
He was looking to redeem himself offer some not so
successful products and pitched New Line and Marvel
on the idea of recontextualizing the relatively obscure
character for the 1990s.
That cool leather clad action hero we just talked about
was nowhere to be found in the original comics.
Instead, what you would have seen
there was a large green glasses sporting action hero
with a luxurious afro constantly utilizing
a bandolier of wooden sticks.
The comic book version of Blade was
much more of a true comic book character,
immensely complex and interesting
to readers of the medium, however,
after the heyday of his run in Tomb of Dracula, arguably not
that digestible by your average reader, which brings us back
to the genius of the film version of Blade,
that foundation setting.
There's a streamlining of all those realities.
His motivation is instantly clear.
He's a man of two worlds.
The duality and contradiction inherent in a vampire who
hunts vampires is a conflict ridden character that
just leaps off of a screen.
It helped that by the mid 1990s, Wesley Snipes
was a bona fide star.
But Blade was the thing that made him a household name.
Couple that with some unique '90s industrial music and blood
showers, and you've got yourself a cult classic.
But a cult classic doesn't often kick off
a 30 year long genre that has completely consumed
the popular culture landscape.
So why was blade able to become the default
template for that genre?
Well, it's kind of hard to communicate efficiently just
how much of a departure the movie Blade was
from the superhero films that came before
throughout the '80s and the '90s.
Blade had attitude, a charismatic star
with a keen intensity.
Do you have an invitation cardoh?
And it was adopting horror aesthetics
and applying them to superheroes, which at the time,
felt like a bold reinvention of extraordinarily
tired genre tropes.
In many respects, Blade was successful
because it picked the best attributes of the character
and disregarded literally everything else.
And this would largely become the de facto stencil
for every comic book hero adaptation during the 2000s.
Gone were the large glasses, afro, bellbottoms.
Now he was a paramilitary creature of the night.
Martial arts Kevlar katanas and Ray-Bans
were here to stay, so much so that the comic book
character began dressing exactly like his movie counterpart
after the film.
And it takes a lot for that cross pollination to happen.
When Batman '89 came out, DC Comics artists
didn't start drawing rubber chest plates and immovable
necks.
When Lou Ferrigno's Hulk made his small screen debut,
Jim Shooter didn't make all the Marvel
artists start drawing a mop top hairdo on Bruce Banner.
For Blade, these more grounded costume,
aesthetic, and logistical changes
seemed like the logical and prudent thing to do,
which meant that when new comic book characters would make
the leap from illustrated page to silver screen,
a similar approach would be the only viable option.
The success of Blade is the very thing
that allowed Spider-Man and The X-Men
to be greenlit with the latter opting
to take creative cues from Day Walker himself.
It was the first drop of water in the storm.
Was the average moviegoing person
ready to see Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Gray in full
on Spandex in the 2000s?
No, probably not, so the creatives
behind the big screen debut of Marvel's Merry Mutants
opted to clad them in black leather
and ground them in a distinct emotionally charged story that
mirrored our own world.
Does that sound familiar?
For better or for worse, this would
become a standard aesthetic for superhero films going forward
for pretty much the entire next decade.
The Matrix, Mutant X, Daredevil, everyone essentially copied
in one way or another Blade's approach
of taking the comic book aesthetic
and loosely translating it to leather coats.
And yet, there's Blade.
Despite having two successful sequel films and a live action
TV show that ran for a season on TNT,
Blade remains a solid cult film, its long lasting impact
on the superhero genre overshadowed
by the twin giants that followed it immediately
in Ramy's Spider-Man series and Singer's X-Men.
Should there be more discussion about the Blade film,
especially the first two?
Should there be a critical analysis
directly linking Blade and David Goyer's initial success
to the massively influential and sometimes controversial
efforts of the current DC Cinematic Universe?
Batman Begins and Man of Steel were both co-written
by Goyer, so yeah, maybe.
But that's a more nuanced conversation.
What's much more simple is that Blade really
is the first truly modern comic book adaptation
to hit the silver screen.
It's an adrenaline fueled sleek action picture that
takes the best of two genres and mashes them up
to create something that was at the time truly original.
Blade in different hands, especially during that era,
would have been a significantly altered film.
And had it been, who knows if we'd even
be in this era of superhero blockbusters.
It's arguably opened the door for the MCU to truly take off.
And look, it may sound like I'm a big comic book movie guy.
I'm really not.
I just find something like Blade so interesting,
because it's such an integral and interesting part of what
really is film history.
I guess what it really does go to show
you is if you're someone in maybe film school,
or maybe you're studying film in your own time.
Maybe you want to be a writer, or director,
or a cinematographer.
Just remember that where the most obvious influences exist,
there's one that likely came before it that's much less
talked about, that's much less subtle,
that might be more pertinent to be studying instead,
that not every director you're watching
and love was influenced by something so huge
that it's on every best of list.
Blade was a big movie, don't get me wrong.
And despite its upcoming reboot, it's
still not discussed in the pantheon
of what makes modern blockbuster superhero film, or really,
modern blockbuster film at this point what
it is, not to the 2000s, not to the 2010s, and not right now.
The moral here is if you're studying art of any kind,
dig deep in your influences, and dig deep in what you study.
If a movie about a vampire sounds ridiculous
while you're hoping to write your next action epic,
maybe it's not as ridiculous as you think.
And even if it is, someday you just
might be glad that you watched that film
and have this nugget of vampire action information
to pull from in your work.
Guys, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
If you enjoyed this one, obviously,
press the Like button down below.
Hit Subscribe so you don't miss anything
that comes to this channel in the future.
And on your screen now should be two more episodes
of Nerdstalgic, so you can click on either of those
to stay right here, and hopefully
I'll see you guys in the next video.
[MUSIC PLAYING]