Summary
Amidst a radical shift in streaming strategy amongst the biggest platforms and a cold war-style arms race for hit content, Warner Bros Discovery has found an unlikely draw in theBladetrilogy, which is doing numbers on the company’s Max streaming service in a rather humorous twist.
Kicking off in 1998 withBlade,theBladetrilogy chronicled the eponymous half-vampire vampire hunter, based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name, as he quests to get revenge on the creatures that killed his mother and made him one of them before subsequently raising the stakes to world-ending proportions in the following installments, ending with a literal vampire genocide in 2004’sBlade: Trinity. While the individual entries were hit or miss for fans and critics alike, there was still a lot to like, andtheBladefilms demonstrated an important rule for trilogiesby outlining the jarring differences that switching directorial vision could cause.
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WhileMarvel Studios has been having a lot of trouble with a proposedBladerebootthat would bring a version of the character portrayed by Mahershala Ali into the Marvel Cinematic Universe fold, the original films have been making waves away from the franchise’s home platform. According to a report fromComicbook, the originalBladefilm from 1998 appeared on the Warner Bros Discovery-owned streaming platform Max’s Top Ten list for the first week of September. The film, which was added alongside the other two projects in the original trilogy only five days prior on September 1st, came in as the fifth most popular film on the platform.
TheBladetrilogy and the first film specifically have seen a lot of renewed interest from the viewing public, in no small part due to the trilogy recently celebrating its 25-year anniversary as well as a possible renewal of interest in the character. With the fifth position on the list,Bladebeat out every DC project featured on the platform with the exception ofThe Flash,which wasfinally released on Max for streaming after a period of uncertaintysurrounding the time frame for the film’s streaming debut. Other films that featured on the Top Ten list alongside the two superhero adventures includeCloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Friday, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,andGangs of New York.
WhileBladeand its successors predate both cinematic universes, the irony of a Marvel film doing well on the home turf of the DCEU and its upcoming revitalization under James Gunn and Peter Safran is by no means trivial. While Disney+ is trimming content and focusing intently on developing projects around IP owned by its parent company, likeStar Warsandthe Marvel Cinematic Universe,and even going so far as tocancel plans for highly anticipated adaptation amidst cost-cutting content strategy, Warner Bros Discovery is seeing benefit from doing the polar opposite and letting Marvel content onto their platform.
While the MCUBladereboot is currently in stasis due to the ongoing Writer’s Guild and Actor’s Guild strikes, which materialized not too long afterthe project was paused while Marvel Studios searched for a new director, fans can get some real enjoyment from reliving the earlier run of films. The trilogy entertained everyone despite the mixed reception to the fluctuating direction of each film caused by the switches between industry greats Stephen Norrington, Guillermo del Tor, and David S. Goyer, and the MCu take seems set to suffer some of the same issues with its continuous switches and production issues.
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