David S. Goyer Shares David Fincher's Never-Realized Vision For Blade Movie

In a conversation on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, writer David S. Goyer (Man of Steel) shared new details about a David Fincher-directed Blade movie that never entered production but came awfully close.

"I developed a draft [of Blade] with Fincher before he had done Se7en," Goyer said (via Variety). “I think he had done Alien 3 and maybe he was developing Se7en. I developed a draft with him. I remember going to our producers 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… I had never seen something like that before. A lot of that thinking infused my further revisions," Goyer said. While Fincher wound up moving on to Se7en, Stephen Norrington ended up directing the first Blade film.

The MCU is set to release a Blade reboot on February 14, 2025, as part of Phase Five. Mahershala Ali will star in the title role. Though still expected to come out, pre-production was paused on the movie earlier this year due to the ongoing writers' strike.

Elsewhere in the interview, Goyer also shared insights into the bumpy development landscape at Warner Bros., shedding light on the studio's ambitious cinematic universe plans and the missed opportunity for a standalone Superman sequel with Henry Cavill.

"I know the pressure we were getting from Warner Bros., which was, 'We need our MCU! We need our MCU!'" Goyer said. "And I was like, let's not run before we walk."

He attributed some of the challenges to the constant turnover of executives at Warner Bros. and DC. "Every 18 months someone new would come in. We were just getting whiplash. Every new person was like, 'We're going to go bigger!'" Goyer said, also remembering a time when Warner Bros. proposed an extensive slate of films for the next decade, none of which had scripts. "It was crazy how much architecture was being built on air… This is not how you build a house."

Goyer's collaboration with Christopher Nolan birthed the 2013's Man of Steel, but Cavill's Superman never received another standalone film opportunity. Instead, he was drawn into universe-building projects like Batman v Superman and Justice League.