10 Reasons Why The Blade Movies Still Matter

A hero all dressed in black, with an ankle-length trench coat, pulling off physics-defying moves while taking out swathes of heavily armed bad guys in a sleek modernist setting, whilst techno pounds on the soundtrack.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this is a description of the iconic lobby attack scene in The Matrix - but Blade did much the same thing a year earlier.

Given that principal photography on The Wachowskis' breakthrough hit was completed in August 1998, around the same time that Blade first screened in US cinemas, we can hardly accuse The Matrix of deliberately stealing from Stephen Norrington's movie.

Even so, there's no denying the similarity, and no question that both films were largely rooted in similar 1990s subcultural trends: cyberpunk chic, rave, trip hop, Hong Kong action cinema, anime. Perhaps the most significant shared influence is the rise of the graphic novel, and the wave of harder-edged, mature reader-oriented comic books that followed in the 1990s.

Still, it's clear that The Matrix (made for a reported $63 million budget, $18 million more than Blade) did a better job in terms of its groundbreaking digital effects, and it clearly had the bigger commercial impact ($463 million global box office, a far bigger haul than Blade's $131 million).

Even so, we shouldn't forget that Blade ventured into similar territory beforehand, and broke new ground in a variety of other ways.