While the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has become the most wildly successful franchise of all time, the series took a long time to get going. Long before Marvel ever started producing their own movies, studios took a chance by embracing the comic book genre in a way that defied conventional wisdom. The film that opened the door for all that was to follow was 1998’s Blade, starring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter. At the time, Blade was a little-known character unless you were a serious comic book fan, but New Line Cinema took a big swing by giving this horror-action movie a significant budget. Granted, one could argue this wasn’t outside of their wheelhouse, with the same company having success a year earlier with their adaptation of Spawn, but Blade was a much bigger deal to audiences when it came out in August of 1998.

Indeed, the film seemed to open Hollywood’s eyes to the potential of more comic book movie franchises beyond Batman, and its 2002 sequel was an even bigger hit. One could argue that without Blade, Bryan Singer’s X-Men might not have gotten made, nor Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and so on. Indeed, it’s an essential piece of comic book movie history and an appropriate way to kick off an all-new series here on JoBlo Originals, Marvel Revisited. In this series, which is written, narrated and edited by Kier Gomes, we go film-by-film, examining how the MCU came to be by profiling all of the movies that helped pave the way to the MCU as we know it now!

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