The directorial career of James Wan can be roughly split into two genres. On the one hand, you’ve got the horror movies that the helmsman made his name on, from Saw to Insidious to The Conjuring. At the same time, Wan has also made two major blockbusters – Fast & Furious 7 and Aquaman – with the potential for further DC flicks in his future.
With this in mind, the Blade franchise sounds like a pretty perfect combination of ingredients for the action/horror director, and if a discussion between the filmmaker and Marvel from a couple of years ago had gone a little differently, perhaps Wan would’ve been the one to bring the vampire-slaying property back to our screens.
In a recent appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Wan recalled one of his earliest attempts at breaking into superhero cinema. “Years back, a couple of years back, I think it was right after Conjuring 1 that I went into a particular studio and told them, ‘Hey, I’m a big fan of Blade. Would you guys be interested in rebooting Blade?’” Wan recalled to the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “Obviously, nothing came out of that! But that was my first intro into looking at potential comic book properties.”
While reboots often find new ways of imagining a character or storyline to deliver audiences something fresh, Wan seemingly didn’t have a game-changing approach to the character, as he couldn’t even remember what angle his reboot would take with the character.
“It was just to kind of talk about it. I didn’t have a full presentation. I did have an idea, I can’t quite remember what it was,” the director confessed. “That’s how far back it was and I’ve done a lot since then so I can’t quite remember what I had thought of. But I did like it at the time.”
The first Blade hits theaters in 1998, pre-dating both X-Men and Spider-Man. The success of those films helped launched a surge of superhero films, many of which were disappointing before the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicked off in 2008.
Source: Happy Sad Confused
