Credit: Far Out / Raph Pour-Hashemi
There aren’t many directors like David Fincher, the master of the modern thriller, who has earned a reputation for demanding nothing but perfection from his crew, his cast, and himself.
Several actors have vowed never to work with him again, but a string of classic movies and a dedicated fanbase prove that he is one of the greats, even though he still hasn’t managed to land an Oscar.
Fincher has said on multiple occasions that he never wants to direct a superhero movie, going on to publicly criticise the genre, labelling Joker a “betrayal of the mentally ill”, but if things had taken a different turn earlier in his career, he might have had a pivotal role in establishing the dominance of comic book movies at the box office in the 21st century.
In 2023, David S Goyer appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast to discuss his legendary career. One of the most successful screenwriters of all time, Goyer contributed the script for several superhero classics, including Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy and Man of Steel, and he has also penned the screenplays for the original Blade trilogy.
As he explained on the podcast, there were early plans for Fincher to direct the first Blade movie in 1998, and he apparently treated this task with his usual meticulous attention to detail.
“I remember going to our producer’s office,” he remembered, “There was this giant conference table. Fincher laid out 40 to 50 books of photography and art with post-it notes inside them. He said, ‘This is the movie’. [He] took us on a two-hour tour around the table of the aesthetics of this scene, that character. It was such a fully fleshed-out visual pitch… I had never seen something like that before. A lot of that thinking infused my further revisions.”
A much darker affair than the cheesy superhero romps of yore, Blade was the first big-screen outing for Marvel Comics’ iconic half-human, half-vampire badass, starring Wesley Snipes in the title role, which was also a massive financial success, raking in $131million from a $45m.
These figures, combined with the success of the X-Men franchise a few years later, paved the way for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the cultural dominance that followed, and while Fincher ultimately parted ways with Blade, he paved the way for Stephen Norrington to step in as director. The sequel was directed by Guillermo del Toro, while Goyer himself took over the reins for the ill-fated Blade: Trinity, and as for Fincher, he moved on to a little movie called Se7en; maybe you’ve heard of it.
While a David Fincher-led version of Blade would have been fascinating, everything worked out for the best after he departed the project, but maybe he can helm the upcoming reboot with Mahershala Ali, which is definitely still happening…
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