Blade's Stacy Osei-Kuffour becomes first Black woman to write a Marvel movie
Movement on the all-important representation and/or “half-vampire-fighting-full-vampires” fronts today, as THR reports that Stacy Osei-Kuffour—the playwright-turned-screenwriter who cut her teeth on shows like PEN15, and especially HBO’s Watchmen—has been tapped to write Marvel’s upcoming Blade movie. That makes Osei-Kuffour the first Black woman to write a Marvel movie, coming not long after Nia DaCosta became the first Black woman to direct one of Disney’s superhero films with the upcoming Captain Marvel 2.
As noted, Osei-Kuffour is best known at the moment for her work on Watchmen, where she served as story editor for the Emmy-winning superhero series, and the credited writer on “An Almost Religious Awe”. (Other credits include work on the recent Run and Hunters.) She joins Blade—which stars Oscar winner Mahershala Ali as the famed bloodsucker-slayer first made popular on movie screens by Wesley Snipes—after a long search for a writer that focused specifically on Black talents. Beyond Ali’s casting—announced back in 2019—and now Osei-Kuffour joining the production, there are still exactly zero details known about what the Blade movie might entail; it’s wild to imagine that, amidst all the other weird shit that’s gone down in the Marvel Cinematic Universe over the last decade, there were also vampires running around out there, eating people and turning into bats and stuff, when they weren’t busy getting blown up by aliens or getting caught in the Blip.
The Snipes Blade films were all written by David S. Goyer, who also directed Blade: Trinity. No word yet on when Marvel is likely to try to get this new Blade film onto its currently still-suspended schedule.