Long before Black Panther there was Blade, a landmark film not just for black heroes on screen but also for comic book adaptations at large. A smash hit long before Marvel’s reign of box office dominance truly began, the 1998 Marvel Comics adaptation cast Wesley Snipes in the role of the badass vampire-slayer, a role he’d go on to play in two subsequent films.
In a tell-all oral history of Blade that went up on EW last week, writer David S. Goyer revealed that New Line wasn’t initially sold on casting Snipes in the lead. According to Goyer, he reveals in the interview, an unnamed studio head had at one point early in pre-production pitched him on turning the black comic book hero into a white character. That’s Hollywood for ya.
“I suggested Blade, as a trilogy,” Goyer recalled. “I remember I came in and said ‘I’m going to pitch you the Star Wars of black vampire films.’ So I pitched it as this racial animosity between the purebloods and the turned vampires, the young Turks like Deacon Frost. And at the same time I wanted to talk about race in a subversive way, and it played into this half-breed idea, if you will — to have one foot in each world and not be accepted by either one.”
He continued, “At one point the [studio] came to us and said ‘can Blade be white?’ and I said ‘absolutely fucking not. Like, that is just terrible. You cannot do that.’”
Once Goyer talked some sense into the studio, they offered to spend more money if a bigger name actor was cast in the lead role, but Goyer again remained true to his vision for the film.
“[New Line studio head] Mike DeLuca said “I’ll make it for $40 million if you can get Denzel Washington, 35 if you can get Wesley Snipes, and 20 if you can get Laurence Fishburne.” And that was it. We wanted Wesley,” he told the site.
Reacting to Goyer’s revelation about the attempted white-washing of the character he made famous in 1998, Snipes himself just told Yahoo that he had never heard the story.
“I wasn’t aware that that was part of the history,” Snipes reacted to Goyer’s comments. “Can you imagine the creative individual who thought of that? Wouldn’t be this! That’s for sure, baby. Wouldn’t be as cool, let me tell you that.”
