23 Years Ago Today, A New Monster Franchise Debuted (& It Almost Crossed Over With Blade)

It has been 23 years today since a monster franchise released its first movie, and it became so successful that it came close to crossing over with Marvel’s Blade on the big screen. In 2003, the world seemed ready for another big action movie with vampires, and one year before the Blade franchise crashed and burned with its third movie, Blade Trinity, something very different was released. This new movie offered monster fans a great time at the movies with a mashup between two of the most famous creatures in monster movie history. While the Blade franchise was ending, the Underworld franchise was just beginning.

The first Underworld movie came out on September 19, 2003. Interestingly enough, while the Blade franchise died after Blade Trinity, the brand-new Underworld franchise almost helped revive the Daywalker, only for Marvel to eventually shut the idea down.

Underworld Launched a New Franchise 23 Years Ago

Underworld was created in 2003 by three men, Kevin Grevioux, Len Wiseman, and Danny McBride. Blade Trinity tried to launch the idea of a multi-monster universe in the following year. Underworld reveled in it from the start with this debut film, and what the movie introduced was incredible. The first Underworld opens in a dystopian world where vampires and werewolves (called lycans in this film) both exist and have been at war with each other for ages. The vampires mostly live above ground, often living in groups in large homes under singular leaders. The lycans live underground, in hiding, and most of them serve under the rule of a lycan named Lucian.

However, this isn’t so much a movie about vampires and lycans just tearing each other apart, although that does happen in the movie. This is a film about vampires who are led by tactical war leaders who use high-powered weapons to gun down lycans in a war of superiority. Kate Beckinsale is the main star of the franchise, an elite vampire named Selene who ends up turning on her own kind when she falls in love with a human named Michael Corvin, a man the lycans want to turn into a weapon and the vampires want dead.

The Underworld series, in general, received negative reviews from critics, but those critics were wrong. This is an incredibly fun movie series, with the first movie introducing a fascinating world of vampires and werewolves and guns and bloody action. The second movie is a continuation in which an ancient vampire awakens and seeks out Michael and Selene, with the twist that the original vampire and werewolf in the past are actually brothers. The third movie brings back Lucian in a prequel that shows why the vampires and lycans really hate each other. The fourth movie continues from the end of the second, and only the fifth movie, Underworld: Blood Wars, is a letdown. Through the first four movies, the worldbuilding and urban fantasy worked on almost every level, and Underworld is a movie series that fans of the action and monster genres deserve to give a second look.

Underworld Was Supposed to Cross Over With Blade

After Underworld: Awakening, there were plans for the Underworld franchise to cross over with Blade. In October 2016, Beckinsale said the crossover had been in development at Marvel Comics the previous year. She would be back as Selene, and Wesley Snipes would return as Blade. However, when Marvel Comics regained the film rights to the character and decided to introduce him into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marvel backed out of the plans.

It is interesting to imagine what that movie could have looked like. The original Blade movies were down and dirty, but they still took place in real-world locations. Most of Underworld looked like it took place in an entirely different world, but thinking of a vampire hunter showing up and getting in the middle of the war between vampires and lycans is intriguing. It surely would have been better than what we got with Underworld: Blood Wars.

It should also be noted that Marvel backed out of the Underworld collaboration because it planned to introduce Blade into the MCU, and 10 years after Beckinsale’s interview, it still hasn’t happened. There were rumors about a script in 2015, and Snipes said that year that he wanted to return in 2015. In 2019, Marvel announced that Mahershala Ali had signed to play Blade, and there was even a voice appearance at the end of Eternals. A variant of Blade showed up in Marvel Zombies, and Snipes returned as another variant in Deadpool & Wolverine, but as of 2026, Blade has still never entered the main MCU timeline.