5 Lessons Blade Taught Studios About Superhero Movies (They Have Clearly Forgotten)

2. The Hero Can Be The Centre Of The (Cinematic) Universe

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has influenced the current direction of superhero movies more than The Avengers and Marvel's successful blueprint on universe building between characters and franchises. The staggering worldwide success of the movie now has every studio with a superhero property scrambling to find ways of creating an entire universe. In the wake of that success, 20th Century Fox wants to unite their Fantastic Four and X-Men properties, and Sony is expanding their lone superhero property Spider-Man into a multi-franchise universe featuring the wall-crawler's villains. Studios are even looking outside of the superhero genre to build connected franchises. Universal is currently planning to create a combined universe of their monster properties such as Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and so on. But in the scramble to snag all those franchise dollars, studios seem to be failing to remember that all it takes is one great character to sell a movie. The character Blade carries his film and drives the plot along. Precious story time isn't spent on winking-to-the-audience references to other Marvel heroes. Even an alternate ending that would have introduced Morbius the Living Vampire was wisely deleted. Unfortunately, by the time the third film rolled around the studio inserted the Nightstalkers (Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds) completely overshadowing the title character. The lesson here isn't less is more but rather one great character can be more than multiple half-developed ones.