Kevin Feige confirms Mahershala Ali is still attached to the MCU Blade reboot, which will be set in modern day
The fact that there was going to be a Blade reboot as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring Mashershala Ali in the title role, came as a huge surprise when the announcement was made at the San Diego Comic-Con back in July of 2019… but we’ve reached the six year anniversary of that announcement, and we still haven’t seen a new Blade movie. The closest we’ve gotten is Ali making a vocal cameo as the character at the end of Eternals back in 2021. Things have been looking dire, with screenwriters and directors coming and going – but while talking to a group of journalists at Marvel Studios last Friday, studio president Kevin Feige confirmed that Ali is still attached to star in an MCU Blade movie, which may have finally found its story and setting.
Last year, we heard a rumor that Mahershala Ali is getting “increasingly frustrated” with the long development process on this one. Delroy Lindo and Aaron Pierre have been cast alongside Ali as the years have gone by, but are no longer involved, as their characters have apparently been written out. Lindo, who has a role in Sinners, recently shared some information on who his Blade character would have been. Co-star Mia Goth, who is rumored to be playing the villainous Lilith, is still attached – and she has said that she’s fine with the delays, because it shows that Marvel really cares about the project. We’ve heard that, at one point, the reboot was going to be set in the 1920s – and that’s why the 1930s-set Sinners ended up using some wardrobe that was originally intended for Blade.
Writers who have worked on the script include Stacy Osei-Kuffour (Watchmen), Michael Starrbury (When They See Us), True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto (who worked with Ali on season 3 of that show), Beau DeMayo (The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf), Michael Green (Logan), and Eric Pearson, who has worked on Thor: Ragnarok, Black Widow, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Feige told the journalists (as reported by Variety) that the Blade delays have been caused by Marvel’s “over-expansion.” That is, their response to Disney’s mandate to produce more content when the Disney+ streaming service was getting started. A response that Feige says brought about a situation at Marvel where, “for the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality.” Now the studio has to recover from that over-expansion, and Blade was a project that stalled out in the process. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on [Ali] 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.“
Feige confirmed that three or four different versions of Blade have been developed over the years, two of which would have been period pieces. But now, “We’ve landed on modern day, and that’s what we’re focusing on.“
There have been rumors that Blade could be handed over to Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever director Ryan Coogler (who also made Sinners), but Feige said that’s not the case. Coogler is focusing on Black Panther 3, and they’re planning to get that one into production sometime soon. There still isn’t a production timeline in mind for Blade.
Asked if he regrets making that Blade announcement in 2019, Feige said, “Only in hindsight, I do. But I don’t. Because that’s the way we’d announced everything before, like that, and had not not delivered.“
What do you think of what Kevin Feige had to say about the Blade delays? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
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