With Marvel surging along with writer Stacy Osei-Kuffour (PEN15) for Mahershala Ali’s upcoming Blade revamp, it appears Wesley Snipes is heading onward with a supernatural action thriller of his own.
No details are available yet about the project, save for what Snipes alluded to in an interview with Uproxx, billing the project as a “Blade-killer”. Even going so far as to call it “Blade on steroids”, he added “…We set our character in the world of shape-shifters and a little bit of time travel. But the action is going to be… Well, we did white belt action in Blade. Now we’re going to do black belt action.”
Visually upgraded for the big screen by New Line from its 1973 comic book likeness by author Marv Wolfman and illustrator Gene Colan, the Blade franchise took off in 1998 under director Stephen Norrington with Snipes starring in the title role, a modern day dhampir (a semi-human with vampire genes) waging a vengeful age-old one-man war against vampires.
The film generated a trilogy with Snipes producing all three films, with Guillermo del Toro sitting in for the 2002 sequel, Blade 2, and franchise screenwriter David S. Goyer sat in for the third, Blade: Trinity (2004), which suffered more critically and controversially despite the trilogy’s overall commercial success.
Following the character’s short stint in a live-action TV and seperate animated series, former editor-in-chief at Marvel, Joe Quesada announced Blade‘s return of rights to the company back in 2011, which ultimately put Marvel in the position to reimagine the character in a way they see fit. By 2019 at the height of its success, Marvel Studios took to the comic-con spotlight for the ceremonial handing of the Blade reins to Ali (Alita: Battle Angel, Marvel’s Luke Cage).
Snipes, who will reunite with respective Dolemite Is My Name star and director Eddie Murphy and Craig Brewer for Amazon’s Coming 2 America on March 5, also said he’s working on a female action franchise on top of other endeavors. You can read it all here.
