Blade (1998)

In 1998, Wesley Snipes took on the role of a Marvel anti-hero who was hardly as popular as the likes of Spider-Man and Wolverine – and nobody could, therefore, truly say that they expected the end result to be a major success.

That character was Blade – a brutal and skilled vampire hunter – and his movie represented something unlike any comic book movie before it. It was a gory, adult offering that really wasn’t suitable for children, distributed by New Line Cinema – a company more famous for is involvement in movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street.

But it worked. And it’s arguable that it represented the platform on which the current crop of successful modern comic book movies has been built, as it’s pretty much all been uphill for the genre since then.

And now we move on to a Marvel Cinematic Universe offering that took us by surprise.