The Daywalker now has someone to write his vampire adventures. Marvel Studios has hired Stacy Osei-Kuffour to write the upcoming Blade film starring Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. The project was announced at Comic-Con back in 2019, and the search for a screenwriter has been going on over the last few months.
Osei-Kuffour becomes Marvel’s first Black female screenwriter. She was part of the writing team on HBO’s Watchmen series, so her comic book cred is legit, and she also worked on the Amazon Prime show Hunters. Her writing on the Hulu series Pen15 earned an Emmy nomination, as well. It’ll be interesting to get a female perspective on the Blade character because the original trilogy is hyper-masculine.
Details on the new Blade movie are slim at this point. Ali takes over from Wesley Snipes, who famously played the half-human/half-vampire crime-fighter in three movies beginning in 1998. The films were not only box office successes, but really helped kick off the modern era of superhero movies, and this was a couple of years before 20th Century Fox’s first X-Men.
There continues to be hopes that Snipes will return to the franchise in some way. On an interesting side note, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige was a co-producer on 2004’s Blade: Trinity, and may want to bring Snipes back himself.
Blade has yet to name a director and is without a release date, but it’s expected to be a part of Phase 5. [THR]