When Mahershala Ali was trotted onstage at 2019’s San Diego Comic-Con to drop the surprise bombshell that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was rebooting a certain Daywalker, nobody would have guessed the production would end up becoming every bit as tortured as its immediate predecessor Blade: Trinity.
After all, the tales of woe emanating from the 2004 threequel have long since become the stuff of legend, with widespread reports of disagreements between star Wesley Snipes and writer/director David S. Goyer getting so heated that the leading man would refuse to come to set, while the evidence is right there that he did indeed decline to even open his eyes for a simple scene of the title hero lying down, resulting in some questionable CGI ocular manipulation.
Panned by critics and a severe under-performer at the box office, it was an ignominious end to a franchise that had helped rehabilitate the entire superhero genre in the eyes of the general public after Stephen Norrington’s 1998 original landed just one year after Batman & Robin had threatened to annihilate the comic book adaptation entirely as a viable enterprise.
The off-camera issues may be an ominous echo, but there’s surely no way Ali’s Blade can turn out any worse than Trinity… or so we hope. Either way, streaming subscribers have opted to take the plunge and see what happens when the leather-clad slayer battles Dracula himself, with Trinity having lodged a stake directly into the heart of the Prime Video viewership charts, per FlixPatrol.
It was a diabolical end to a promising saga, and we can only hope history doesn’t end up repeating itself.
