“And that was it”: the iconic 1998 role Denzel Washington was priced out of playing
As one of modern cinema’s rarest double threats, being one of its finest actors and biggest movie stars, Denzel Washington doesn’t come cheap, and he hasn’t for a long time.
Since earning his first $10million paycheque for 1996’s Courage Under Fire, by which point he was already an Academy Award winner and an A-lister, Washington has very rarely removed himself from the eight-figure club, and his usual asking price is at least double.
The man knows what he’s worth, and when a studio isn’t willing to pay him what he’s worth, he’ll walk away, as he showed when he briefly departed Tony Scott’s Unstoppable over a pay dispute, before eventually being enticed back into the fold with remuneration that was much more to his liking.
If you want one of Hollywood’s elite thespians and bankable action heroes, then you’ve got to pay, and when a studio boss equated an in-development production’s budget with the status of its leading man, Washington’s going rule ruled him out of the running, costing him an iconic 1990s role in the process.
In hindsight, it was one of the most quietly influential parts of the last 25 years, too. Before Stephen Norrington’s Blade, the superhero genre was on its last legs, crippled by a succession of dire comic book adaptations, with the industry becoming increasingly convinced that it was virtually a dead medium.
Bryan Singer’s X-Men takes a lot of credit for ushering in the Marvel era that shows no signs of going away anytime soon, but Blade laid the groundwork by proving that comic book characters were capable of taking centre stage in a hit movie, and an R-rated one at that.
Blade had been in development since the early ’90s, and as usual, finances were the sticking point. New Line Cinema was footing the bill, and during his conversations with the boardroom, screenwriter David S Goyer was told that the amount of funding he’d receive was dependent on the film’s most important casting choice.
“Mike DeLuca said, ‘I’ll make it for $40m if you can get Denzel Washington, $35 million if you can get Wesley Snipes, and $20m if you can get Laurence Fishburne,” he was informed. “And that was it.” Washington was the bigger star, but Goyer always envisioned Snipes as the vampire-killing vampire, so he didn’t mind taking the budgetary hit.
Then again, he didn’t, seeing as the Denzel-less Blade ended up costing $45 million anyway, making it something of a moot point. Still, in an alternate universe where New Line wasn’t quite as overtly penny-pinching, it was Washington who helped ignite the comic book boom at the turn of the millennium, and not Snipes.
