Ryan Reynolds, Wesley Snipes and how Blade: Trinity became Marvel’s biggest disaster

Spoiler alert! This article reveals major plot elements of Deadpool & Wolverine

In the autumn of 2003, a motley crew of the nearly famous and the famously kooky assembled in Vancouver to shoot a comic book film. One was an erratic leading man on his last legs as a movie star. Two were pleasingly dull twentysomethings who’d been anointed Hollywood’s next big things. Another was an actor in the midst of a near-fatal personal crisis. Also milling around Canada after dark were a WWE wrestler, an ageing country-and-western legend, and the coolest indie-movie actor of the Nineties, who’d prepared for the film by running errands in New York wearing vampire fangs.

This unlikely ensemble – Wesley Snipes, Ryan Reynolds, Jessica Biel, Natasha Lyonne, Triple H, Kris Kristofferson and Parker Posey, respectively – were making Blade: Trinity, a doomed franchise-capper that would unexpectedly serve as the blueprint not only for the worst impulses of the Marvel Cinematic Universe but of Reynolds’s future career.

That anyone is even thinking about Blade: Trinity this week is because a new film gestures right back at it: of the many top-secret cameos in Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine, it’s Snipes’s return as Blade that is the most surprising. He joins a number of other faces from Ye Olde Marvel to appear, all of whom are asked to grapple with their aborted franchises and/or general unpopularity in fan circles.

What makes Snipes’s appearance so intriguing, though, is that Marvel has been unsuccessfully trying to mount a Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali since 2019 – two directors have jumped ship and at least four screenwriters have worked on the script. Snipes’s seamless reprisal of the role – and Blade’s boast that “there’s only one” of him – suggests that Marvel chief Kevin Feige may be regretful about not bringing him back full-time. And then there’s the fact that Snipes and Reynolds famously despised each other on the Blade: Trinity set, lending their scenes in Deadpool & Wolverine a prickly tension. “I don’t like you,” Blade tells Deadpool. “You never did,” he winks back.

Unexpectedly, then, Deadpool & Wolverine serves as a bit of a full-circle moment for both Snipes and Reynolds, putting to bed years of apparent animosity between the pair. That’s the hope anyway. Perhaps Snipes was just presented with a really big cheque. Or maybe both of them realised how silly their feud originally was.

At least one never-quite-confirmed claim from the Blade: Trinity set alleged that Snipes refused to call Reynolds by his name. Instead, he’d solely refer to him as “that cracker”. But that story is just one tiny part of Blade: Trinity lore. The picture painted by many of the film’s cast and crew is of a set plagued by dysfunction and egos, with studio interference leaving everyone involved feeling miserable. And it’s genuinely quite sad, particularly when 1998’s pulpy Blade – starring Snipes and Stephen Dorff – and its Guillermo del Toro-directed sequel, 2002’s Blade II, are now regarded as bonafide Marvel classics. Blade: Trinity isn’t just the runt of the litter, either, but a creaky, quippy calamity.

By the time Blade: Trinity was put into production, New Line Cinema – which owned the rights to the Blade character – was eager to monetise the franchise more effectively than it had before. The mid-Noughties were a no man’s land for Marvel properties, with Marvel Studios – which shepherded in the MCU – not yet in existence, and the likes of Spider-Man and the X-Men owned by separate studios. With no overarching, Feige-esque leader in control of the characters, it meant Marvel films were wildly disparate in quality and in tone. For every gloomy Ang Lee-directed Hulk was a sunny, PG-rated Fantastic Four. Blade, as played by Snipes, existed somewhere in the middle. His films were incredibly violent and gory, but also quite silly. (“Some motherf*****s are always trying to ice skate uphill,” Blade inexplicably jokes right before killing Dorff’s villain.) It’s partly why Blade and Blade II remain so popular today – in spirit and aesthetics, few pre-MCU Marvel films feel as in keeping with their comic book forebears.

Why, then, did a third Blade go so awry? By all accounts, there was trouble even before production began, with Snipes reportedly unhappy with the script (it involves the character fighting Dracula), and New Line’s choice of director (while it’s never been confirmed, this was likely German filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel, who’d go on to make, um, the horrific Naomi Watts Princess Diana movie). That unhappiness led to New Line promoting to director David S Goyer, who’d written the scripts for all three films.

At the same time, New Line wanted the Blade movies to have spin-off potential, so requested the introduction of two new characters: vampire hunters Hannibal King and Abigail Whistler, the latter the estranged daughter of Blade’s mentor, played by Kris Kristofferson. Reynolds and Biel were cast in the roles, respectively. But the fact that Snipes is Black and the new buddies of Blade were not proved to be another issue. In her 2017 memoir, You’re on an Airplane, Posey wrote that Snipes felt he was “possibly losing control of the franchise to [his] younger (and whiter)” co-stars. The series was, at first, incredibly unique in this regard, a rare franchise of films from this era in American cinema – superhero or not – led by a Black man. It is noticeable, though, that they became increasingly white as they went on (a love interest played by Black actor N’Bushe Wright in the first film, for instance, was nowhere to be found in Blade II). By Blade: Trinity, its hero feels more like a co-lead rather than the film’s anchor.

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Snipes reportedly made his upset clear. As recalled in an infamous interview with The AV Club in 2012, actor and comedian Patton Oswalt – who has a small role in the film as one of Hannibal and Abigail’s allies – remembered Snipes as “just f****** crazy in a hilarious way”. He claimed Snipes once attempted to strangle Goyer, stayed in his trailer for most of filming and only agreed to shoot scenes that required his face in close-up. His stunt double would be used for any other shot of Blade in the film. Oswalt also claimed that Snipes “would only communicate with [Goyer] through Post-it notes, and he would sign each Post-it note ‘From Blade’.”

Lyonne, who plays a blind scientist in the film, was also in the midst of “some kind of mental breakdown”, Oswalt added. Her lack of boundaries and Snipes’s withdrawal from people created further tension on set. “She was playing blind,” he said. “So the first scene they had together, she put her hand right on his face, and he just recoiled. It was awesome.” As an aside, Lyonne – who was struggling with addiction during filming – would later recall being embarrassed by her own performance, and that she was smoking a cigarette on the set when she was approached by Kristofferson. “He said, ‘You remind me of my old friend Janis Joplin’, and that’s when I knew I’d done poorly in the film.”

Snipes himself has somewhat disputed Oswalt’s claims, and explicitly denied strangling Goyer, telling The Guardian in 2020 that “a Black guy with muscles strangling the director of a movie is going to jail, I guarantee you”. He added that he was upset that many have taken Oswalt’s allegations at face value. “Why do people believe this guy’s version of this story? … This is part of the challenges that we as African Americans face here in America – these microaggressions. The presumption that one white guy can make a statement and that statement stands as true! Why would people believe his version is true? Because they are predisposed to believing the Black guy is always the problem.”

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But others reported difficulties too. The source of the “cracker” story is a journalist named Chris Parry, who spent two days on the Blade: Trinity set for Spin magazine. He claimed that Snipes was dismissive of his co-stars (he would also allegedly refer to Biel as “that girl”) and would stay in his trailer for much of filming. The piece quoted Reynolds as saying that he and Snipes “don’t talk much – but he’s a heck of a presence”.

Goyer has obliquely discussed the film’s “tortured production”, explaining in 2021 that: “I have tremendous respect for Wesley as an actor. He used to be a friend … I don’t think anyone involved in that film had a good experience on that film, certainly I didn’t. I don’t think anybody involved with that film is happy with the results.”

In her memoir, Posey also recounts working almost exclusively with Snipes’s stunt double but takes a more empathetic approach to the actor’s behaviour. At one point, she remembered attempting to bond with Snipes over their shared history – both attended the same prestigious New York drama school, though at different times, and shared the same mentor. She recalled trying to talk to him about acting and theatre and some of the independent films Snipes once made, but that he “was in battle mode – his sunglasses never came off”. “You don’t understand, you don’t understand the whole story,” she said he’d repeatedly tell her, ambiguously.

Snipes would go on to file a lawsuit against New Line Cinema in 2005, claiming that – despite being a producer on the film – he was not given the opportunity to object to Goyer as director, or the script’s “juvenile level of humour”. He also claimed that the film’s “real purpose” was to set up spin-offs for Reynolds and Biel, and that the film’s all-white cast and crew were intentionally hired to foster his “isolation and exclusion” on the set. It is unclear what happened with the lawsuit or whether it was settled – Snipes had additional legal troubles around this period involving tax evasion, for which he served 28 months in prison – but the actor did later allude to his status not being respected. “I had contractual director approval,” he told The Guardian. “I was not just the actor for hire. I had authority to say, to dictate, to decide. This was a hard concept for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.”

Blade: Trinity was released in December 2004 to dismal reviews (“a bloody bore,” wrote Roger Ebert), and barely broke even at the international box office. The franchise – as well as those mooted spin-offs – was immediately put on ice, and Snipes never led another studio film again. No one particularly needs to see the film today, either, but there is curiosity to be had by watching Reynolds in it, and the first glimpses at what would ultimately become his bread and butter as a performer.

As Hannibal King, Reynolds is snarky, self-referential and always on hand with a cutesy (read: incredibly annoying) quip. “In the movies, Dracula wears a cape and some old English guy always manages to save the day,” he says in the film’s opening narration. “But everybody knows the movies are full of s***.” Later, when he’s being tortured by Posey’s slinky supervillain, he remarks that he “ate a lot of garlic and just farted – silent but deadly”.

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It’s a strain of humour that’s inappropriate for the Blade movies – it’s no wonder Snipes made sure to talk about “juvenile” jokes in his lawsuit – but, oddly, it does predict where Marvel would end up going. Hannibal wouldn’t be out of place in any number of the MCU movies of the future, including – look at that! – the Deadpool series, with its crude gags and hunger for mock outrage. And there’s a resistance to sincerity in Blade: Trinity that feels instructive for the MCU, too – a desire to keep the jokes flowing at all times; a total disinterest in emotional complexity.

Deadpool & Wolverine suggests that Reynolds and Snipes have put their differences aside (at the San Diego Comic-Con this week, Reynolds also introduced Snipes, perhaps with tongue in cheek, as his “good friend” during a panel on the film). But the film should also cast a light back on Blade: Trinity and its (negative) influence on Marvel as a whole. As further demonstrated by the troubled current state of the Blade reboot, Snipes seemed to be the person holding the franchise together in its original incarnation (“Wesley knows Blade better … than anyone else involved in the franchise,” Guillermo del Toro once said). Take him out of the equation and you’ve got nothing. It’s a lesson even Ryan Reynolds ended up learning. Perhaps, with Snipes now back in the comic book fold, Marvel should do the same.

‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ is in cinemas