Blade's Ridiculous Movie Ending Comes To Marvel Comics
Warning: contains spoilers for The Amazing Spider-Man #92.BEY
Fans of Marvel cinema won't forget the iconic ending of the first Blade movie. Now that same ending has come to Marvel Comics. It happens in the early pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #92.BEY.
These add-on issues to The Amazing Spider-Man have focused primarily on the group known as the Slingers as well as Misty Knight and Colleen Wing. Earlier in the series, Morbius was captured by Ben Reilly's Spider-Man and experimented on by the Beyond Corporation. After initially wanting Spider-Man to undergo a vampiric transformation, Beyond experimented on the lizard instead. They created a lizard/vampire hybrid they dubbed Creature Z.
In the issue written by Jed MacKay, Cody Ziglar, and Zeb Wells and illustrated by Luigi Zagaria, Bruno Oliviera, Fran Galan, and Mark Bagley with Wayne Faucher, Morbius eventually decides to defeat the Lizard by allowing him to feast on his blood. Because the lizard and vampire inside him was in perfect balance, drinking the vampire blood sent Creature Z's body into flux. He started mutating and became engorged, eventually exploding. This ending is eerily similar to the end of Blade, when the title character infected Deacon Frost with a virus that also caused the villain to become a massive blob creature and blow up. The comic even features similar aftermath where the characters are covered in lizard blood from the explosion.
It's quite a coincidence and very fitting that Morbius is the one to come up with this plan when he and Blade have clashed repeatedly in the comics. They are practically arch enemies with each other, so the fact that Morbius was able to defeat a villain in much the same manner that Blade did in an iconic movie is too perfect. And ironically, it was the vampiric nature of both Deacon Frost and the Lizard that caused the transformation in the first place.
It's especially ironic given that ending to Blade almost didn't happen. The original ending, which can be found online, had Deacon turn into a CGI blood tornado. The sequence is rough and not finalized, but it was probably for the best that they avoided using it given the limitations of CGI at the time. Blade was able to defeat this swirling blood storm using the same virus, but this ending is nowhere near as iconic as the very cool swordfight fans got instead. So it is quite strange that Blade's ending was changed and decades later was used as a means to defeat a vampire Lizard.