Blade (1998)
Those shifts we were just discussing? Well, after the macabre Batman Returns, Warner Bros. began to pull Batman back towards more commercially friendly realms. But 1997 saw the franchise reach peak cheesiness with Batman and Robin, with almost catastrophic results for superhero movies. It was eight years until the Dark Knight could be reconfigured for the silver screen. Thankfully, the genre as a whole recovered much sooner because of Blade.
Like Tim Burton’s Batman, Blade convinced onlookers that comic book movies didn’t have to be shallower, kid-friendly entertainment. It might have been an intensely stylized picture, with vampire-gods and death-by-boomerangs, but Blade didn’t adhere to overtly comic book-y tropes. Instead, director Steven Norrington hewed closer to traditional, hardcore action movies, using horror tropes only when needed. It was this approach that imbibed Blade with a coolness and a sense of legitimacy that had not existed at that point in the genre.
Some would argue that it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men which catalyzed comic book adaptations of the 21st Century, but nowadays this feels like a somewhat unfair assumption. Indeed, after a series of failing films such as the, ahem, interesting Spawn, Blade revitalized the superhero genre by being a fresh and sturdy offering in and of itself. Plus, Wesley Snipes did such a bang up job with the character that fans still clamor for him to reclaim the role.
