Wesley Snipes' Best Blade Quote Has A Weird Finger-Licking Origin

Just before the turn of the century, Marvel Comics staple Blade (Wesley Snipes) stepped out of the shadows to make his theatrical debut. The half-human, half-vampire took the cinema by storm in 1998 in his first live-action movie full of action, blood, and even a little bit of comedy, for good measure. The adaptation also spawned one of the most iconic quotes in superhero movie history: "Some m************ are always trying to ice skate uphill." As it turns out, this unforgettable Blade line has a rather strange origin.

During a chat with ComicBook.com, Snipes revealed that he came up with the line about fools setting themselves up for failure while the team behind "Blade" was still putting the script together. Oddly enough, he adds that it came to him in the middle of a chicken dinner. As they worked their way through the script during a table read, it suddenly popped into his head, and the rest is comic book movie history. "It was one of those inspirations. It just came out. Yeah. So it's originally mine, originally, over dinner table and sour cream chicken," he recalled.

While this quote may be a bit silly and can take some first-time viewers by surprise as a result, it's undeniably memorable — much like the film and wider franchise it's a part of.

Occasionally cheesy dialogue, dated costume choices, and rough CGI aside, it's impossible to overstate the importance of "Blade" and, to some extent, its sequels "Blade II" and "Blade: Trinity" to the Marvel movie phenomenon. At a time when superhero adaptations were severely lacking (for reference, "Batman & Robin" debuted a year before "Blade"), the 1998 film especially proved that such features could bring in casual moviegoers and turn a profit. Thus, it paved the way for other Marvel Comics favorites to receive movies of their own and for the Marvel Cinematic Universe to become an entertainment powerhouse.

This fact isn't lost on Wesley Snipes either, as he admitted in a 2014 interview with the Telegraph: "If I would have understood the potential of...doing, or adapting comic book characters to feature films, and also the tie-in to gaming and digital technology, when I was doing the first 'Blade' films, then I'd be in a different business now." Snipes left the Blade role behind following the disastrous release of "Blade: Trinity," which he filmed his scenes for in some truly bizarre ways that have gone down in comic book movie infamy.

As the MCU's "Blade" gets underway with Mahershala Ali signed on in the lead role, many fans of the Wesley Snipes films believe Marvel Studios is attempting to ice skate uphill with its reboot. Hopefully, for fans of the Blade character and the folks involved with the film, that old chicken dinner-inspired adage Snipes coined decades ago won't hold true.