Blade was one of the lesser known Marvel Comics characters, but I grew up reading books he was in. In the 1990s he was part of the "Midnight Sons", a team of supernatural superheroes that included Ghost Rider (the #1 hero of my childhood), Morbius the living vampire, Doctor Strange, Blade's buddies in the Nightstalkers group, and others, and since I was a devoted Ghost Rider reader I also read through everything that was connected to the character. So I was very familiar with Blade when it was announced he was getting his own movie, to be released in 1998.
I was very pleased with BLADE and Wesley Snipes' performance as the lead character – this was a case where the cinematic version of a character was actually more likeable than the one on the page. Comic book Blade was kind of a dick. I mean, this was a guy so obsessed with wiping out the supernatural that he even killed the other members of the Midnight Sons in one story arc. Not cool.
A few years later, BLADE II was also awesome, and a couple years after that BLADE: TRINITY was… less than awesome. That was followed by a short-lived TV series, in which Snipes was replaced by Sticky Fingaz. Eleven years later, I still haven't gotten around to watching that show.
Back in 2013, Kevin Feige, the president of Marvel Studios, mentioned that the company had regained the rights to some characters they had loaned out to other studios – Ghost Rider, The Punisher, and Blade. Since then, two of those characters have made it into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Ghost Rider appearing on the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. series and The Punisher being introduced in the Daredevil Netflix series, with his own series coming soon. But where is Blade?
Our own Eric Walkuski recently got to speak with Feige about all things Marvel, and during their conversation Feige gave an EXCLUSIVE quote on whether or not we can expect to see Blade in a new Marvel project:
We think it would be cool. Someday. My tenure at Marvel started 17 years ago, and there were two things that sort of launched the modern era. One was X-Men, which was the first thing that people said, "Oh, there's life here." But a few years before that, there was Blade. A character nobody had heard of at all, had only appeared in a few issues of Tomb of Dracula or something, turned into a big franchise. That was always a great lesson for me, where you go, "It doesn't matter how well known the character is, it matters how cool the movie is." Which, many years later, would be the reason we do Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange. I think Blade is a legacy character now, and I think it would be fun to do something with him one day.
There doesn't seem to be any immediate plans for the character, but it is good to know that Marvel Studios intends to bring Blade back to the screen "someday".