10 Reasons Why The Blade Movies Still Matter
9. It Was The First Franchise To Take Comic Books Seriously
Blade may have kick-started the Marvel movie machine, but it was by no means the first comic book adaptation to hit the big screen. Most notably, Warner Bros had brought the DC Comics icons Superman and Batman to the big screen four times each - five for Batman if we count the 1966 TV spin-off movie.
Still, whilst Warners had pioneered the comic book movie format, they hadn't taken especially good care of it. After starting off beautifully, the Superman franchise went rapidly downhill before hitting the wall with 1987's disastrous Superman IV: The Quest for Peace; and the Dark Knight had suffered an equally stunning fall from grace with 1997's Batman and Robin, which opened only a year before Blade.
The problem, it seemed, was that filmmakers like Joel Schumacher and Sidney J Furie appeared to be under the misapprehension that adopting a comic book tone meant being utterly stupid, and playing the entire thing for awkward laughs.
Happily, Blade director Stephen Norrington seemed to understand that the trick was to fully embrace this heightened alternate reality, and to play the human drama and emotion as real, even if the circumstances are clearly heightened.
This is not to say that Blade doesn't have moments of outright absurdity - just look at any of the poses Snipes strikes every time he kills a vampire - yet there's a clear sense that the film is having fun with the material, as opposed to making fun of it the way other comic book movies had before.
This distinction was vital for the major superhero movies that followed in the 2000s.