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Wesley Snipes has broken two Guinness World Records with his cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine.
The actor returned as the half-vampire daywalker Blade in Deadpool & Wolverine 25 years and 340 days after his first playing the character in Blade way back in 1998. This makes him the actor with the longest career as a Marvel character, according to Guinness World Records.
Snipes, 61, beat out Wolverine star Hugh Jackman, who first appeared in X-Men 24 years ago. Jackman was expected to take this record from Sir Patrick Stewart, whose first appearance as Charles Xavier also came in the same movie and the last in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness in 2022.
Snipes’s cameo also marked the longest gap between character appearances in Marvel films. He last played Blade 19 years and 231 days ago in Blade: Trinity, breaking the record previously held by Alfred Molina who played Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 in 2004 and again in Spider-Man: No Way Home in 2021.
The third film in the Deadpool franchise, which released on 26 July, sees Reynolds return as the “merc with a mouth” alongside Jackman’s bearded mutant who was seemingly killed off in 2017’s Logan.
Snipes appeared in Blade: Trinity with Reynolds, who played Hannibal King, and has said that he was initially hesitant about reprising the role when Reynolds reached out.
“I did not think it was possible. I didn’t think we would be able to pull it off,” Snipes told Entertainment Weekly, recalling Reynolds’ text about the cameo.
“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. Let’s see what this is about.’ He told me the idea... They said ‘yes’ and ‘it’s a go.’ ‘If you’re in, we’re in.’ Here we are.”
*Spoilers follow*
The film features several cameos by characters from before the Marvel Cinematic Universe days. Captain America Chris Evans returns as his Fantastic Four character Johnny Storm, Jennifer Garner as Elektra and Channing Tatum as Gambit, making several jokes about his own film that never got off the ground.
Deadpool & Wolverine has received mixed reviews. The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey gave it two stars, describing it as a “tedious and annoying corporate merger of a film”.
The film has broken several records at the box office, however, collecting $205m in its opening weekend in North America to become the eighth-best debut and surpassing the first film in the franchise, Deadpool of 2016, for the biggest opening for an R-rated film.
