While certain players may bow out of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe after The Avengers: Infinity War, that doesn’t mean the franchise is ending. Phase IV will simply add in new blood to replace the actors who have fulfilled their contracts and want to go back to their lives after giving a decade or more to Marvel. Captain Marvel is on the horizon, and honestly she’s the obvious successor to Captain America (unless they want to go full on Falcon-becomes-Cap). Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Spider-Man (Tom Holland) are already on deck, and Adam Warlock looks to be coming in the future. But there’s another Marvel hero that Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige wants to bring to the table: Blade.
In a recent interview with JoBlo, Feige stated the hope is to one day get Blade into the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“We think it would be cool. Someday […] [Blade] was always a great lesson for me, where you go, “It doesn’t matter how well known the character is, it matters how cool the movie is.” Which, many years later, would be the reason we do Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Strange. I think Blade is a legacy character now, and I think it would be fun to do something with him one day.”
Now, “someday” is the Hollywood equivalent of a parent responding to a request with “We’ll see.” It usually means “no.” But there is precedent for a previously used character to show up shiny and new now that Spider-Man: Homecoming shares the webslinger between Marvel and Sony. And Marvel wouldn’t even have to share custody of the vampire hunter as the character rights reverted to Marvel back in 2013. The only problem I really see? Phase IV of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is already looking heavy on the dudes. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is the only female character of prominence. Sure, Wasp (Evangeline Lily) will get an expanded role in the second Ant-Man film, but Marvel could still use some more ladies, especially non-white ladies, in lead roles, of which there are currently none. Luckily, when it comes to Blade, there is another: Blade’s daughter, Fallon Grey.
If you’ve never heard of Fallon or her comic, that’s not a surprise. The series was first announced back in 2015 as part of Marvel’s push to diversify their superhero line-up. Fallon was conceived as the “anti-Peter Parker.” She was a popular prom queen who just happens to be a descendant of vampire hunters. Think Buffy if she was also the captain of the debate team. The series would have been from writer Tim Seeley (Grayson, Batman Eternal, Hack/Slash) and gone on sale in October of 2015. Then, it disappeared.
Over a year later, Blade resurfaced when Seeley gave a wide-ranging interview to Newsarama. When asked what happened to the comic, Seeley was incredibly honest.
“The short story is I quit. The long story is when Marvel hired me, I had just written ten years of a horror comic starring a female lead so I seemed like a good fit. So we threw around ideas of doing Blade’s daughter and when they announced it, Marvel was in a weird place because they had announced the hip-hop covers and a lot of people saw “here’s another black lead with an all-white creative team” and you know it’s valid and definitely the case. Once the announcement hit, it was just one bad week. I kinda felt that it was completely fair and never something we hadn’t considered, but everybody at Marvel was totally cool about it and wanted to find a way to make it work. After a while, I felt like it was me screwing this up. I couldn’t help but feel like a black woman might write this stuff better than me and saved them from me. In the wake of Black Panther launching so well, maybe Blade is the book they find new talent on.”
That interview was in September of 2016. As of this writing, it is June of 2017 and Fallon Grey is still living in limbo. I reached out to Marvel to see what the status was and a representative simply said the company has “no comment” at this time. But a loss for the comic book side of Marvel could be a gain for Marvel Studios. Blade: Trinity came out in 2004. A new movie introducing Fallon Grey wouldn’t show up for at least another two years or more, just the right timeline for Blade to have produced a teenage daughter with small-town Oregon gal. Fallon could easily be a foil for Tom Holland’s Spider-Man. Heck, throw in Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel and Miles Morales and there’s another decade of movies starring a young, diverse cast right there.