It takes an incredible amount of work, luck, and synergy for a movie to get made, and as such the streets of Hollywood are littered with what-might-have-beens and never-wases and some of them are really, really awesome. Case in point, a newly reported Blade film that was being worked on by the original trilogy’s screenwriter David S. Goyer and legendary director David Fincher. The film never came to be, but just putting those two names together in conjunction with the darker, R-rated superhero Blade is kind of exciting.
Goyer dropped this unexploded bomb during an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Collider), revealing that he and a very young Fincher had collaborated to bring Blade to the big screen in a trilogy of films that never got made. At the time, Goyer wasn’t the established screenwriter of dark and gritty superhero films and Fincher was coming off the dreadful experience of directing Alien 3 so it’s easy to see that both would be interested in a project like Blade. Evidently, Fincer was very interested, diving deep into developing the character and the story as one might think the director of films like Se7ven and Zodiac might do.
Related: Frustratingly, Blade Is a More Loving Homage to Hong Kong Cinema Than Shang-Chi
“I developed a draft with Fincher before he had done Se7en,” Goyer said. “I think he had done Alien 3 and maybe he was developing Se7en. I developed a draft with him. I remember going to our producer’s office… 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.’ [Fincher] 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.”
Evidently, we have Fincher to thank for how great a film the original Blade turned out to be, though that may also mean we have him to blame for Blade III as well, which Goyer wrote and directed. Or maybe his influence had worn off by then. Either way, this Goyer/Fincher Blade series never saw the light of day as the pair went on to work on other things, with Stephen Norrington directing the first Blade film. Fincher, on the other hand, has done just fine, though he hasn’t been pulled into directing a superhero movie yet.
