Before Se7en, David Fincher nearly sunk his teeth into Blade

Today, it’s impossible to imagine David Fincher directing a superhero movie. Honestly, in 1994, it was kind of impossible, too. Considering the hell Fincher went through making Alien³, it seemed like he was done with franchise filmmaking entirely. But leave it to screenwriter David S. Goyer to reveal that he and Fincher developed a Blade movie together before Se7en came along. In a conversation bursting with interesting tidbits about the last 30 years of genre filmmaking, David S. Goyer told Josh Horowitz of The Happy Sad Confused podcast [via Variety] about working on Blade with Fincher.

“I developed a draft with Fincher before he had done Se7en. I think he had done Alien³, and maybe he was developing Se7en. I developed a draft with him,” he says. “I remember going to our producer’s office. There was this giant conference table. Fincher laid out 40 to 50 books of photography and art with post-it notes inside them. He said, ‘This is the movie.’”

As Goyer describes it, Fincher was far more involved in the development process than expected. Goyer recalls the future Killer director taking him on a “two-hour tour” of the aesthetics for the movie, describing the vibe for different scenes and characters. “It was such a fully fleshed-out visual pitch,” Goyer says. “I had never done something like that before.”

Obviously, Fincher didn’t end up making a Blade movie and instead left to do Se7en. On the other hand, Goyer wound up writing not just one Blade but three—he also directed the third one, but even he probably doesn’t want us talking about that. For his part, Goyer believes that some of Fincher’s “thinking infused” his revisions.

Aside from developing Blade with the Finchman and a Star Wars with Guillermo del Toro, Goyer is something of a recurring character in the pre-MCU comic book movie landscape. He was even there when Warner Bros., in their post-Dark Knight trilogy tailspin, decided it needed its own MCU, which considering the studio was a “revolving door of executives” was a little difficult.

“I remember at one point the person running Warner Bros. at the time had this release that pitched the next 20 movies over the next 10 years. But none of them had been written yet!” Goyer said. “It was crazy how much architecture was being built on air… This is not how you build a house.”

We assume he’s talking about the time in 2014 when former WB CEO Kevin Tsujihara announced 10 movies (of which four never happened and three were Suicide Squad, Justice League, and The Flash), but who’s counting?