Success Quote by Avi Arad

Avi Arad’s sentence is doing a neat bit of Hollywood self-mythmaking: it frames Blade not just as a hit, but as a wake-up call to an industry that didn’t know what it had. The most telling phrase is “everybody but us.” It’s classic producer rhetoric, a quiet claim of insider vision that doubles as an absolution. If the market surprised you, that surprise becomes proof of genius rather than a sign you were guessing.

The context matters. Blade (1998) arrived before “superhero movies” hardened into a prestige IP pipeline; it was R-rated, vampire-forward, and led by Wesley Snipes in a moment when studios still treated comics as a risky niche. Arad’s “the community knew Blade” nods to fandom as early market research, but also positions fans as a separate country Hollywood occasionally visits for resources. The subtext: the audience was there all along; the gatekeepers just weren’t listening.

Then he pivots to the “DVD revolution,” and you can hear the business brain clicking. Box office is presented as the headline shock, but “subsequently the DVD” is the real revelation: the long tail where a mid-budget genre film can become a phenomenon, expanding its cultural footprint in living rooms long after theaters move on. Calling it “wildfire” isn’t just hype. It’s a metaphor for distribution itself - a story about how the new format spread taste, built repeat viewing, and quietly trained consumers to collect franchises. Arad isn’t only celebrating Blade; he’s marking the moment Hollywood learned to monetize obsession.