Ryan Reynolds Has a Point: Wesley Snipes’ Blade Would Be Great in the MCU

The whispers and, if you’ll pardon the pun, sniping around Marvel Studios’ long-gestating Blade reboot have reached a level of farce with MCU fans. As someone who was actually in Hall H when two-time Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali walked on stage to don a hat emblazoned with the famous vampire hunter’s name, I can attest excitement for the project was electric in 2019. However, after more than five years of false starts, emerging and exiting director hires, and plenty of rewrites, the movie still seems no closer to fruition. It was in fact only a few months ago that THR reported Ali is “increasingly frustrated” by the movie’s lengthy pre-production issues.

All of which appears to be important context given the latest social media post from Ryan Reynolds, the frontman of Marvel’s most successful movie in years, Deadpool & Wolverine, and an unexpected champion for Wesley Snipes as the Daywalker.

“The reaction when [Wesley Snipes] enters the movie is the most intense thing I’ve heard in a theater,” Reynolds wrote on Instagram while praising Snipes’ surprise cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine. “People screaming with uninhibited joy and love is also the sound of a legacy. More Blade please. #DayWalker.” He then added, “A Logan-style send off, specifically.”

It’s an amusing turn of events given the infamous, although perhaps overstated, history Snipes and Reynolds allegedly shared on the third and, to date, final Blade movie, 2004’s little-loved Blade: Trinity. In that movie, Snipes’ typically laconic vampire hunter was virtually mute while sharing the screen with Reynolds’ Hannibal King, a new vampire hunter who New Line Cinema was reportedly eying for a possible spinoff. Stories shared by co-stars and crew suggest there was plenty of unhappiness on that production.

But if there was, it seems the hatchet was buried when Snipes reprised the role of Blade for an extended cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, complete with a fourth-wall-breaking gag at those old Hollywood gossips when Snipes’ Blade hisses, “I don’t like you,” and Reynolds’ Deadpool fires back, “You never did.”

If that’s true, the dynamic has obviously changed. As with all the actors of beloved (or at least infamous) 2000s and 2010s superhero movies who showed up for an extended bit in Deadpool & Wolverine, Reynolds has been singing Snipes’ praises on all social media platforms. This includes when he celebrated Snipes’ legacy on Aug. 5 by posting, “There is no Fox Marvel universe without Blade first creating a market. He is Marvel Daddy. Please share for a Logan-like send off.”

In recent years, Reynolds has become as famous for his brand-building and social media marketing strategies as he is for wearing red and black onesies on screen. And while his testimonials seemed genuine, they were also smart post-release Deadpool 3 promotion. But that initial praise for Snipes appears to be more than just marketing; he seems to be genuinely using his knack for social media triangulation to drum up interest for an old co-worker returning to the role of Blade. Which makes the inclusion of Snipes’ line in Deadpool & Wolverine where he says, “There’s only ever going to be one Blade,” all the more interesting in retrospect.

It seems Snipes’ recent insistence that there’s always been real love between the co-stars is based on something real. It would also appear, from the outside, Reynolds is putting genuine pressure on Marvel to bring Snipes back for a full-fledged Blade 4 (or at least hoping to get fan enthusiasm for the idea on the industry’s radar). And we have to admit this makes a lot of sense to us, not least of all because this writer is of an age where Snipes’ turn as the Daywalker was my first introduction to a Marvel hero in a movie (albeit on Starz, because I was too young to go see an R-rated movie on the big screen).

If THR’s June report on the progress of the Blade movie is accurate, with the paper suggesting there is a disagreement between the studio and the actor, the latter of which supposedly sees Blade as an opportunity to do his “own Black Panther,” then it seems quite probable that project is stalled in the water. Blade has never been a cultural phenomenon character with four-quadrant, PG-13 appeal. However, if Disney is serious about producing more R-rated genre movies not just like Deadpool & Wolverine but also Logan or, for that matter, Alien: Romulus, which opened at $42 million on an $80 million budget this past weekend, then Blade is a perfect character to revisit in that more economical, adult-leaning space.

Blade is a Kung-fu fighting vampire hunter, with all the blood and mayhem that concept entails. While the antihero has some roots in all-age comics after being created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan in The Tomb of Dracula #10, in the popular imagination… he is Wesley Snipes wielding a silver sword as he cuts bloodsuckers in half and quips, “Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill.”

We would never say take the project away from an actor as gifted and interesting as Mahershala Ali. So if he is still committed to doing a Blade movie—one that might have an easier shot at being an R-rated thriller after Deadpool 3 and the aforementioned Alien’s success in their relative lanes—then it would be unwise and unfair to take the project away. But if he is ready to really move on (including by starring in the next Jurassic Park movie), Marvel has seen what kind of reaction bringing legacy characters back with popular castings can yield, a la Hugh Jackman finally donning that yellow spandex.

A case can be made that Snipes really is “Marvel daddy,” so letting daddy come home for an R-rated action/horror hybrid as committed to honoring that legacy—or in other words a Logan style swan song—would surely be an event film and prove there is still plenty of fresh blood in the MCU’s veins.