Wesley Snipes cheekily weighed in with his thoughts over Marvel's troubled reboot of Blade.
In 1998, Snipes played the titular character in Blade, a superhero horror film about a human with vampire strengths who wages a war with vampires who are threatening human existence.
He reprised his character in the successive sequel films, 1998’s Blade, 2002’s Blade II, and 2004’s Blade Trinity.
With the enormous popularity of the R-rated superhero franchise that leaned more toward the horror genre, a fourth installment seemed inevitable, but it was not without complications.
For years, the planned Blade reboot had its share of stops and starts with the re-shuffling of writers and scheduling delays exacerbated by the writers' and actors' strikes last summer.
The project hit another snag recently with the announcement of a second director who decided to abandon the project.
On Saturday, the 61-year-old wrote on X (formerly Twitter):
"Blade, lordylordylordy."
"folks still lookin for the secret sauce, ridin snowmobiles in traffic, kinda rough. Daywalkers make it look easy, don’t they?"
Blade fans weighed in with their thoughts.
In 2014, Snipes was rumored to be reprising Blade in a fourth installment.
“I’d be open to it," he reportedly said, adding:
"I think we’ve got some stones left unturned and there’s some latitude left for us to build on and I’d love to get back in the suit again and do something I’ve learned how to do now that I didn’t know how to do then.”
That prospect went out the window when in 2019 at Comic-Con in San Diego, Marvel President Kevin Feige announced that two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali would take over as Blade with Mogul Mowgli filmmaker Bassam Tariq attached to direct.
In November 2021, Snipes gave a supportive nod to his successor, saying "He will do great."
However, he noted that he will always be Blade.
The reboot was slated for a November 2023 release. In September 2022, Tariq announced he would be leaving the director's chair but said he would remain as an executive producer.
Marvel explained at the time that Tariq's departure was "due to continued shifts in our production schedule.”
Filmmaker Yann Demange then signed on to direct the project in November 2022 after it had been delayed for a September 2024 opening, but it was pushed back again for February 14, 2025, due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes.
Currently, the reboot is planned for a November 7, 2025 release date.
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