Blade · reception & legacy
1998 · Stephen Norrington
How Blade has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
In 1998 it was received as a solid, slightly disreputable action hit — a vampire movie that critics shrugged at. Now it's routinely credited as the film that proved Marvel could work on screen, two years before X-Men and a decade before the MCU.
What's debated
The perennial fan gripe: superhero-movie histories start the modern era with X-Men (2000), and Blade fans insist that's erasure — Blade walked so the MCU could run.
Its footprint
The blood-rave opening is one of the most referenced needle-drop sequences of the '90s, and 'some motherf***ers are always trying to ice skate uphill' remains an evergreen quote — the whole techno-vampire aesthetic became shorthand for late-90s cool.
Where it stands
A canon climber: once filed under B-movie action, now a genuine Letterboxd favourite and a 'you have to understand where superhero movies actually started' talking point.