"As I recall, the movies are titled Blade and Wesley Snipes is the actor/artist that brought the comic book character to life," read the letter, whose contents were confirmed by two sources.

New Line executives declined comment. Goyer, who also wrote the first two Blade films, now shrugs it off.

"There has always been a little bit of drama on the Blade sets," Goyer said. "They are all edgy characters, they have a certain amount of darkness in them. . . . That is why we cast Wesley in the lead. . . . It became clear to me that Wesley is a very Method actor. When he is doing a Blade movie he is Blade and he acts like Blade. Blade is edgy and bristly."

Hollywood is well known for pardoning bad behavior -- as long as the star performs at the box office. And the Blade films, unlike other Snipes movies of late, have done handsomely, racking up worldwide grosses of $286 million and $250 million in domestic DVD sales. Snipes himself has earned a progressively larger paycheck for each of the films, estimated at $8 million for the first and $12 million for Blade: Trinity.

But time may be running out. New Line has a contractual option to make another Blade movie with Biel and Reynolds, and if Dec. 10's Blade: Trinity is a success, a fourth movie could star the young actors and not Snipes.

Michael De Luca, the executive who brought the Blade series to New Line Cinema, said Snipes' career reflects the way Hollywood works. Success is a combination of "smart choices" and having "decent parts offered."

In Snipes' case, there is still hope, said De Luca, now a producer at Sony.

"I still think the promise is there," he said. "Once you are a movie star, you are always a movie star. All it takes is one more film to put you back on top."