Wesley Snipes Teasing More Blade With Donald Trump Campaign Slogan

Actor Wesley Snipes took to Twitter yesterday, and turned U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s famous campaign slogan on its head with “Made American Blade again.”

The tweet — which some, of course, are taking as a tease that Snipes is or would like to be involved with the vampire-hunter franchise once more — comes on the heels of a U.S. Presidential debate in which Trump suggested that paying as little in taxes as he can get away with is “smart,” and a meme featuring the candidate and Snipes — who served prison time for tax evasion — made the rounds on social media.

About an hour before the Blade tweet, Snipes shared a version of the Trump/Snipes meme, which he had seemingly not created (as it refers to Snipes in the third person) but clearly endorsed.

If there’s any one franchise that can be credited with helping to facilitate the current golden age of comic book movies, Blade can make a strong case for itself.

While Tim Burton’s Batman had already shaken Hollywood to its foundation, built a blockbuster franchise, and then seen that franchise peter out, Blade stormed into theaters as a cool, sexy, R-rated mash-up of horror movie tropes and superhero standards, and became the first movie based on a Marvel Comics property to get both a major theatrical release and generally favorable reviews.

And while Superman: The Movie and Batman (and even later hits like Spider-Man and X-Men) were based on top-tier superheroes with widespread name recognition, Blade was a relatively minor character inside of comics, virtually unknown outside of it. That, plus the lead being a person of color, made the success of Blade seem unlikely to many Hollywood observers, and arguably helped set the table for films like Jonah Hex and Guardians of the Galaxy to be taken seriously at a studio level.

“Blade was a masterpiece. The end,” filmmaker Lexi Alexander recently tweeted during a discussion about how the film doesn’t get enough recognition.

Ever since his release from prison in 2013, Snipes has expressed an interest in returning to the Blade franchise (there were three films, although the third was not well-received by fans or critics). Rumors have popped up periodically and then gone nowhere, and the last anyone heard was about a year ago, when Snipes said that he had talked with Marvel about doing something Blade-related. Snipes, though, is no longer a marquee box office draw, so conventional wisdom says that the most likely scenario would be for him to have a role as a supporting character or a villain in a Blade reboot, if it were to happen.