Exclusive: Wesley Snipes Returning As Blade In Secret Wars
Wesley Snipes will return as Blade in the upcoming MCU Secret Wars event.
Update: While there is still time for Wesley Snipes to appear in Secret Wars, he did make a Marvel appearance first in Deadpool & Wolverine.
According to our trusted and proven sources, Wesley Snipes will reprise the role of Blade in the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe film Secret Wars. This will be the first official appearance of Wesley Snipes as the famed vampire hunter in years and one of the highest profile appearances for the actor in quite some time. He will be just one of many comic book characters (and their variants) that are expected to appear in Secret Wars, but also one of the most exciting.
Wesley Snipes began portraying Blade in 1998, taking a little-known Marvel Comics character from the 1970s and turning him into the lead of a huge franchise of films. In the years between the explosive blockbuster of Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 and the resurgence of the genre with Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000, comic book movies were hard to come by (good ones, anyway) and Blade hit the spot. Wesley Snipes would reprise the role in two sequels, with Guillermo del Toro’s 2002 Blade II being considered a high point for the series.
However, Wesley Snipes has not returned to the character of Blade for a long time now. The closest we have gotten was a cameo appearance by the actor in an episode of the FX vampire show What We Do in the Shadows, in which a suspiciously similar character officially credited as “Wesley” teleconference into a vampiric council. In the meantime, Wesley Snipes has kept busy with a long period of direct-to-DVD action movies in the early 2000s and, more recently, with well-regarded supporting parts in Eddie Murphy movies like Dolemite Is My Name and Coming 2 America.
Mahershala Ali was cast as the Marvel Cinematic Universe version of Blade in 2019, though a post-credits vocal cameo in 2021’s Eternals is the closest we have come to an actual appearance so far. While there is little information on the plot of Secret Wars so far, we can assume that it will involve heroes and villains from all over the multiverse coming together, so a meeting of Wesley Snipes classic Blade and Mahershala Ali nouveau Blade makes complete sense. In the past, Wesley Snipes has wished Ali well for taking on the part and expressed interest in a part in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so it looks like dreams are coming true.
Wesley Snipes showing up as Blade to Battleworld with pretty much every character in Marvel history in Secret Wars is already exciting enough, but we have recently had reports of several others either returning or in talks to. Ian McKellen is to reprise the role of mutant leader Magneto in the crossover event film, and it seems that Nicolas Cage is in discussion to return as Ghost Rider. Getting Blade, Magneto, Ghost Rider, and maybe even Wolverine together to fight the Beyonder sounds pretty amazing to us.
Secret Wars is currently scheduled to be released in November of 2025, so we have quite a few years and a lot of movies to get through before we get to see Wesley Snipes again. But we can safely say, we are already excited.
