Hulu Now Streaming a Hit Marvel Trilogy

The Blade trilogy is now streaming at Hulu, bringing the franchise to the Disney-owned streaming service where it joins several of its offbeat Marvel brethren. The original Blade, released on the heels of Batman & Robin's failure, helped shape the next decade of superhero and comic book movies, embracing a black leather aesthetic that would shape Bryan Singer's X-Men films. They would also share a lot of DNA with other high concept popcorn movies of the 2000s, including the Underworld series, in which an underground horde of leather-and-latex-clad vampires ruled from the shadows of society.

The movies also elevated the profile of Blade as a character. Originally introduced in one of Marvel's horror anthology titles, Blade was never an A-list character...but after the release of the first movie, both Blade himself and franchise star Wesley Snipes got immediate status upgrades.

Snipes remains so closely tied to the character, that even after a 28-month prison term for tax evasion and more than a decade away from the series, fans went right back to asking for his return. Once Mahershala Ali was cast in the upcoming Blade reboot from Marvel Studios, fans started asking about a cameo for Snipes, or whether he might get a shot to play the film's villain or something.

The three movies earned a combined $417 million at the box office -- which doesn't sound like much by contemporary standards, but bear in mind that the movies cost a combined $164 million to make. That's less than the average single Marvel or DC movie now.

Created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, Blade is a half-human, half-vampire who has basically all of the vampires' strengths but none of their weaknesses. He hunts evil vampires, and has faced off against everyone from Dracula to Morbius. The latter was actually considered as an antagonist for one of the Blade movies, but scrapped. Some people claim his removal had to do with rights complications, since Morbius is a villain that is shared between a handful of heroes...including Spider-Man, whose franchise was hugely successful during most of the time the Blade trilogy was in happening.

You can tune into all three Blade movies on Hulu now. Its spinoff TV show, Blade: The Series, is available to stream on Tubi. That one doesn't have Wesley Snipes or decades of cultural cache, but it was one of the first big comics-to-screen projects that Geoff Johns worked on.