Bethesda SoftworksFrom the moment he was introduced in the pages of 1973’s Tomb of Dracula #10, Blade was destined to be a pop culture icon and one of the most beloved supernatural characters in comics. Created in the lineage of Marvel’s (at the time) very successful horror comics, Blade’s origins technically started with a failed pitch from his creator Marv Wolfman for a Black character in DC Comics’ Teen Titans — afterwards, he promised himself that the next character he created would be a Black man, owing to his childhood in New York City and his education at the High School of Art and Design, surrounded by everyday Black citizens who he felt were underrepresented in a comic book industry. In 1972, Wolfman was hired at Marvel Comics and eventually landed in the scripting chair for Tomb of Dracula, and in an instant, Wolfman says “the character came to him full blown,” knowing “exactly who he was and what he looked like.”Initially the character remained confined to group horror books like Tomb of Dracula and Adventure Into Fear, but the ‘90s brought him renewed interest, partially because of being folded into the Midnight Sons imprint of supernatural characters such as Ghost Rider and Morbius the Living Vampire, and partially because of the release of the iconic 1998 film adaptation starring Wesley Snipes. Blade was quite literally the first successful Marvel film project and not only did it lead to two sequels of its own, it paved the way for the continued success of other Marvel Comics properties. The MCU probably would not exist without it, which is why it’s so disappointing that a planned reboot for the character starring Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali never materialized. And if that wasn’t enough, it was recently announced that Microsoft is considering shuttering Arkane Studios, the developer behind the possibly upcoming Blade video game — with all that in mind, there’s one question weighing on this bewildered writer’s mind: are modern Blade adaptations cursed?Wesley Snipes’ cinematic introduction to the character in 1998 was a bit of a far cry from the British Blaxploitation vampire slayer of the 70s, but to this day it’s still his only cinematic depiction. | New Line CinemaAt first glance you’d think there wouldn’t be any reason behind all the trouble. Blade is a character that seems like he’d be eternally popular. Despite the dated leather-clad late-’90s aesthetics of the original film, it’s still a widely beloved early contribution to the superhero movie boom, and the unprecedented success of 2018’s Black Panther is proof that there is an audience out there hungry for more Black superheroes on-screen. And even though he’s not in tights fighting traditional supervillains, Blade’s particular prey, the vampire, has quite literally never gone out of style: the success of Sinners last year, both critically and commercially, shows that there’s still new blood to be pumped out of such a long-lived concept.Of course, his recent stumbles aren’t necessarily a failure of the character himself. Since Mahershala Ali first approached Kevin Feige with his desire to star in a reboot a whole 7 years ago, the film’s production has been hammered with all manner of production issues and delays, many stemming from both the 2023 WGA strikes as well as the MCU’s struggle to regain its footing post-Avengers: Endgame. The film has seen as many as six different screenwriters come and go (each with such radically different takes on the material that costumes designed for a 1920s period piece were retooled for Sinners). Two different directors tried and failed to get the project back on the rails, only for it to be rumored earlier this year that the project was dead in the water and being retooled into a Midnight Sons team-up movie. On the gaming side, Arkane Studios’ potential closure is part of a larger wave of planned lay-offs by Xbox and Microsoft, with The Verge reporting that the Blade game had been internally delayed by a year while also running over budget.If it still gets released, the video game from Arkane Studios and Bethesda would be the first solo Blade game in 24 years and the first game ever not based on a pre-existing adaptation. | Bethesda SoftworksIt’s extremely frustrating to see such a fan-favorite character consistently fail to find a fresh resurgence outside of comics, especially since he seems to have no trouble existing in a larger ensemble — an alternate universe version of Ali’s unseen Blade debuted in the Marvel Zombies TV series bearing the Moon Knight mantle, the character was added to the free-to-play team-shooter Marvel Rivals back in August of 2025, and he’s a part of the launch roster for the upcoming fighting game Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. However, this is part of a long-standing problem for the character: despite appearing in countless team-up books and company-wide crossovers, Blade has only ever had three ongoing solo titles in comics in his 50-plus year history. It’s a combination of several different issues: the lack of focus on many Black characters across mainstream comics, a lack of a truly great hook to propel him through multiple years of an ongoing series, and his specific niche (fighting vampires) bristling against a company that never really seems to know what to do with its occult and supernatural-based characters.Despite his lack of prominent attention in comics, there’s still so much of Blade that has never really been engaged with in supplemental material. His original mentor Jamal Afari, a Black jazz musician moonlighting as a vampire hunter, was traded out for Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler in the original film trilogy. His work with countless vampire hunting teams and his long-standing, globe-trotting quest to slay Dracula was adapted so poorly in Blade: Trinity you might as well not call it an adaptation at all. Even his freshest status quo change, the existence of a teenage daughter named Brielle Brooks, could be an interesting avenue to bring the character back to the big screen if done correctly. From his inception, Blade has been a character who has had to fight the odds (from emerging amidst a shameful lack of representation in comics to the litany of production issues preventing an acclaimed actor from properly inhabiting the role), but his continued appearances in other Marvel projects is proof that there’s so much depth to the Daywalker. He’s just waiting for a chance to be unearthed and unleashed upon unfamiliar audiences with fangs bared.