Wesley Snipes Thought Blade Return in ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Wouldn’t Make Sense With MCU’s Reboot on the Way; He Originally Moved on After Talks for Fourth Movie Died

variety.com:

Zack Sharf Digital News Director SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Deadpool & Wolverine,” which is now playing in theaters Wesley Snipes opened up to Entertainment Weekly about what it was like reprising Blade in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” He was one of the film’s big cameos and even attended San Diego Comic-Con last week to surprise fans after a screening of the Marvel blockbuster with the movie’s other cameo actors. “Over the years, we’ve had very interesting conversations, some of them very substantive and some of them not,” Snipes told EW about bringing his iteration of Blade back for a fourth go-around. “So I kind of resided that I was moving on from them, which is okay.

I did three of them, and I thought they turned out pretty good. Not so bad… So we move on to other things, and bigger and better things, as well.” Snipes debuted as Blade in the 1998 movie of the same name and reprised the character in 2002’s “Blade II,” directed by Guillermo del Toro, and 2004’s “Blade: Trinity.” The latter film co-starred Ryan Reynolds, who just so happened to text Snipes during development on “Deadpool & Wolverine” to ask if he might be interested in reprising Blade.

Reynolds sent a text that read: “I want to talk to you.” “I did not think it was possible,” Snipes said of his return to Blade after 20 years. “I didn’t think we would be able to pull it off.

I didn’t think that Marvel was into it, Disney was into it — also because they had Mahershala [Ali] cast for the next upcoming version of it…I thought it didn’t make sense to me, but [when] you get a call from Ryan Reynolds out of the blue after 20 years, you go, ‘Okay, I got to take this call.