It’s a shame that Wesley Snipes is such a dick, because the first two Blade movies are fucking fangtastic. It’s Snipes attitude that’s really to blame for the third one, his character was marginalized in preparation for a franchise takeover by Ryan Reynolds who, is a lot easier to work with. Without Snipes as the focus, Blade Trinity was an unmitigated disaster and the whole vampire hunting franchise went straight into the sewer.
A few years later in a franchise recycling friendly environment there’s now talk of bringing it all back and righting what once went wrong. Mania has been talking to Stephen Norrington, director of the first Blade movie. He tells them that he’s working on a return to the world of Blade once he finishes his current project, an unnecessary remake of The Crow. His leading man for Blade: Revisited? He wants Stephen Dorff.
And that’s really where the third Blade movie went so horribly wrong. If they wanted to push Wesley Snipes out of the picture then they should have brought in Stephen Dorff rather than trying to shoehorn in a new to the franchise Ryan Reynolds. Dorff is the vampire villain Deacon Frost in the first film and he’s the only other character besides Blade himself, who has ever really left much of an impression on the Blade franchise or its fans. If you have to make a movie without Wesley Snipes, then using Deacon Frost is the way to do it.
One slight problem though. Deacon Frost was dead by the time the first movie ended. The solution to that problem is revealed in an old, 2008 Daily Mail interview with Dorff, where he talked in rather certain terms about doing a new Blade movie. He says, “It will be a prequel to the Blade movies, Deacon's story. It's a new trilogy the director has created. It will [be] cool.”
At the time no one seemed to take him seriously but now, with Norrington’s comments added in it seems as though this thing is really happening. One more problem though: It’s being directed by Stephen Norrington.
The best Blade movie and the one that really put the whole thing on the map was Blade II directed by Guillermo del Toro, not Norrington’s excellent but less widely watched niche movie. And then there’s Norrington himself who after Blade in 1998 has basically gone on to do, well, nothing good. His only noteworthy post-Blade film was 2003’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and we all know how that turned out. Maybe even Blade was just a fluke. A prequel focused on Deacon Frost is a great idea, but do we really want Stephen Norrington directing it?
