In disappointing but unfortunately not surprising news given its troubled production history, it looks like Marvel's Blade reboot has officially taken a final stake through the heart according to Marvel Studios' Kevin Feige.
First announced by Fiege all the way back in 2019 at San Diego Comic Con, Marvel's Blade was set to see Mahershala Ali (Moonlight, True Detective) play the vampire-human hybrid first originated on-screen by Wesley Snipes in 1998. The project went on to add, and lose, both Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange as directors, with True Detective‘s Nic Pizzolatto then brought on to rewrite a draft script from Michael Starrbury (When They See Us.)
Also attached to star were scream queen Mia Goth (X, Pearl) and Delroy Lindo (Sinners), with an original release date of November 3, 2023 bumped to September 6, 2024, then to February 14, 2025, and then to November 7, 2025, before Blade was removed from the release schedule entirely in October 2024. Further seeds of doubt were sewn when Blade‘s costuming department ended up selling “a warehouse full of period-appropriate clothes” to Ryan Coogler's vampire epic Sinners.
Despite all this, there was still a glimmer of hope – in June of last year, Ali said he was “ready” to step into the leather trench coat and sunglasses.
Sadly, speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast earlier this week (clip seen below), Feige seems to confirm what we all suspected, saying he feels like ” a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
This is in line with what Feige told press last year about Blade‘s continued stalling:
“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.”
Frankly, to us, putting two time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali in a badass leather outfit and having him kill vampires is precisely what we would want from a Blade movie, but hey, we're not multi-million dollar studio executives so what do we know, right?
Blade may be laid to rest (for now, anyway), but we still have another horror superhero tale to look forward to with James Watkins' Clayface hitting theaters this October.
