Blade: David Fincher originally worked with David Goyer to develop Wesley Snipes movie

Before X-Men or Spider-Man, there was Blade, the 1998 movie starring Wesley Snipes as the iconic vampire hunter. The film was written by David Goyer, who revealed on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he originally developed a draft of Blade with none other than David Fincher.

At the time, David Fincher had only directed Alien 3, so he was far from the high-profile filmmaker we know today. “I developed a draft with Fincher before he had done Seven,” Goyer said. “I think he had done Alien 3 and maybe he was developing Seven. I developed a draft with him. I remember going to our producers office, and Fincher had this…there was this giant conference table. Fincher laid out 40 to 50 books of photography and art with post-it notes inside them. He said, ‘This is the movie.’“

Goyer continued, “[Fincher] took us on a two-hour tour around the table of the aesthetics of this scene, that character. It was such a fully fleshed-out visual pitch. There’s no question that a lot of that…I had never seen something like that before. A lot of that thinking infused my further revisions.” It took a number of years before Blade finally got off the ground, and by that point, David Fincher had moved on to Se7en and the movie wound up being directed by Stephen Norrington.

Yann Demange (White Boy Rick) is set to direct the new Blade for Marvel, which will star Mahershala Ali, Delroy Lindo, and Mia Goth. The character of Blade was originally created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan for The Tomb of Dracula #10 in 1973. Blade is a half-mortal, half-immortal who hunts vampires in order to avenge his mother, who was killed by a vampire as she gave birth to him. True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto signed on to work on the Blade script in an effort to get it into shape before production began, but the WGA strike prompted Marvel to delay shooting and push back its release to February 14, 2025.

As for David Fincher, his latest film is The Killer, an action thriller based on the graphic novels written by Alexis Nolent and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. Michael Fassbender stars as an assassin who gets embroiled in an international manhunt after a hit goes wrong. The film recently debuted at the Venice Film Festival and will be released in select theaters on October 27th before streaming on Netflix on November 10th.