The Blade reboot, starring Mahershala Ali, was announced with much fanfare at Comic-Con in 2019. The actor even made a voice appearance as the character in a post-credits scene in Eternals two years later. But then, the film got stuck in limbo, and it recently emerged that the project was no longer moving forward. Now, Mahershala has called out Marvel Studios for their intentions about the project, saying they never wanted to make it.
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The Blade reboot was first announced with Tariq as director, before he was replaced by Yann Demange. Eventually, after years in pre-production, the film never went into production. By 2025, there were rumours that the film had been shelved, as Marvel had not shared any updates on a release date. This was seemingly confirmed by Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige last month.
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Mahershala is currently promoting his upcoming film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. The film is directed by Bassam Tariq, who was Marvel’s original choice for Blade. In a conversation with GQ, Mahershala opened up about the shelved film and how it gave birth to this one. “When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me. And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for Blade. In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level, just in my own journey between me, myself, and I,” the actor said.
However, Mahershala did seem to harbour some hurt and resentment towards Marvel over the shelved Blade reboot. He added, “When I look at what is for me, is it was either this or that — and I’ll take this. No offense to them. I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on. Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Feige said, “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala. We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on Blade, and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Blade, a vampire hunter from Marvel Comics, was first brought to the big screen in the eponymous 1998 film starring Wesley Snipes. Its commercial success led to two sequels in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Snipes reprised his role in a cameo in Deadpool and Wolverine (2024).
