10 Reasons Why The Blade Movies Still Matter

David Goyer is, not without reason, something of a divisive figure in comic book movie fandom today. As a screenwriter, many hold him culpable for some of the failings of the early DCEU movies; as a director, he was without doubt largely responsible for the demise of the Blade series.

Even so, there can be no doubt that Goyer was a key figure in forging the current comic book movie landscape, and is to all intents and purposes the creator of the Blade we know today.

Blade may have been created in 1973 by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan (whose names reputedly appeared in the first film's opening credits at Goyer's behest), but Goyer radically revised the character and his world for the screen.

While it was established that Blade's mother was slain by a vampire while giving birth, in the comics this simply rendered him impervious to a vampire's bite. The concept of the Daywalker - a half-breed with vampire super-strength, impervious to sunlight, garlic etc, but still vulnerable to the thirst for human blood - was entirely Goyer's creation, not to mention the character of Blade's mentor and armourer Whistler. (All of this is now canon in contemporary Blade comics.)

While he embellished on the character, Goyer's scripts were founded first and foremost on taking the material seriously, and striving to accurately convey the spirit of a comic book on screen, which existing comic book movies had for the most part failed to do.

This reverence for the genre clearly had a role to play in landing him the job of co-writer on Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, some of the most acclaimed and commercially successful comic book films yet made.