Stephen Dorff’s Deacon Frost project probably won’t be a Blade spinoff

Some time last year, BLADE filmmaker Steve Norrington claimed that he and actor Stephen Dorff had come up with an idea focusing on the ladyhaired bloodsucker that clashed with Wesley Snipes’ Daywalker in the first flick.

While Norrington initially said their Deacon Frost spinoff/prequel idea had “evolved into a very interesting story”, there was still the question of how it would fit into the existing mythology, not to mention the rights issues.

But now that the BLADE movie property will likely get rebooted by Marvel proper, it sounds like Dorff is circumventing that matter by making it an original story. As he recently told the Dark Lord Bunnykins blog: “Me and Steve Norrington had a cool treatment for that, and when vampires got all this trending again, we thought we should do the adult version, more of like a SCARFACE Deacon Frost movie. And it sounded cool, this treatment, but then there was so many legal things. Like New Line owned Blade and Marvel’s got… all this hype into THE AVENGERS and this group movie which sounds like such a mistake.”

Dorff continues: “I didn’t want to do a BLADE movie, I just really wanted to take Deacon and do then do a whole other thing which was much more today. So the idea me and Steve had, we might just end up fictionalizing it and just making a new character which might even be better for us. And he’s someone I really like and would love to work with again. So hopefully whenever we get a chance we’ll get into that.”

So it seems that, unless they can somehow extricate the Frost character from Marvel, they’re going to alter the pasty villain enough to make it something “new”. But then remains the question of Norrington actually making it — since LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, the director has been attached to AKIRA, CLASH OF THE TITANS, GHOST RIDER, FREDDY vs. JASON and THE CROW reboot, and inevitably departed all of them.