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Sorry, Blade fans—Mahershala Ali's Eric Brooks won't be swooping into theaters anytime soon.
Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige essentially drove a stake into the project's heart when he recently revealed, "I'm feeling...like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn't get off the ground with Mahershala."
Fans got the faintest of teases at the end of Eternals, which featured an audio cameo from Blade, who cautions Dane Whitman (Kit Harrington) about picking up the Ebony Blade. This not only laid the groundwork for Blade's solo debut, but it also sparked speculation over a potential team-up of supernatural heroes known as the Midnight Sons.
Based on Feige's latest comments, one can only surmise that A) Blade is dead or B) it'll still happen, but with a different actor.
The Troubled History Of Marvel Studios' Blade Reboot Starring Mahershala Ali
Feige announced the studio's fresh take on the Blade IP in 2019 during Marvel's Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con. Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli) landed the directing job in 2021, with Stacy Osei-Kuffour (HBO's Watchmen) tapped to write the screenplay. An eventual rewrite was done by erstwhile X-Men '97 showrunner Beau DeMayo and Ben Sokolowski.
“Character is very important for me," Tariq told The Playlist in an interview shortly after his official hiring. "I don’t think of genre, I think of character. It’s not so boxed in as people imagine it to be [working with Marvel Studios]. It’s quite exciting. And I think the reality is there is no Blade canon, you know? If you ever read the comics, they’re always changing…Unfortunately, the [comic book series] never lasted that long.”
The filmmaker parted ways with Blade a year later, albeit staying on as executive producer, just as production was ramping up in Georgia ahead of the title's then-November 2023 release date. Marvel Studios cited "continued shifts in our production schedule" for the decision.
Tariq added: “It’s been an honor working with the wonderful folks at Marvel. We were able to put together a killer cast and crew. Eager to see where the next director takes the film."
By that time, Delroy Lindo (Sinners) and Aaron Pierre (Old) had already been cast in supporting roles, while a number of MCU alumni, including Black Panther's Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter and Eternals VFX supervisor Mårten Larsson, signed on as behind-the-camera talent.
A month after Tariq's exit, Yann Demange (White Boy Rick) stepped in as director at the behest of Ali himself. In addition, Michael Starrbury (When They See Us) was recruited to pen another screenplay, though this draft would also be rewritten by True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto. As a result, Blade got pushed down the road to fall 2024.
Still, the casting of Mia Goth, breakout star of of Ti West's X trilogy, offered a glimmer of hope for the movie, which was reportedly going to be a period piece set in the 1920s.
But progress came to a screeching halt in the wake of the 2023 writers' strike, robbing Pizzolatto of the time needed to complete his rewrite of Starrbury's draft. Marvel subsequently delayed the film yet again to early 2025, with Ruth E. Cater moving on to Ryan Coogler's Sinners, for which she was able to use some of the costumes already designed for Blade.
The interminable search for a workable screenplay continued when Marvel sought a new script from Michael Green (Blade Runner 2049) over the fact that Ali was threatening to leave the project over story concerns.
Demange left the now-trudging production in summer 2024 as Black Widow scribe Eric Pearson became the latest person to tackle the screenplay. Goth (rumored to be playing Lilith) was still attached—and seems to remain attached—but Pierre and Lindo dropped out.
The outlook was bleak.
"When Marvel came to me, they seemed to be really interested in my input," Lindo remarked to Entertainment Weekly last spring. "And in the various conversations I had with producers, the writer, the director at the time, it was all leading into being very inclusive. It was really exciting conceptually, but it was also exciting in terms of the character that was going to form. And then, for whatever reason, it just went off the rails."
Meanwhile, Feige said the constant delays were due to a desire to get the story right.
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” he told Variety last summer. “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.”
Audiences briefly reunited with Wesley Snipes' version of the leather-clad vampire hunter in 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine, whose TVA-heavy plot allowed for the revival of defunct character interpretations.
The MCU returns to the big screen July 31 with Spider-Man: Brand New Day. That's merely the appetizer for the epic multiversal crossover that is Avengers: Doomsday—in theaters Dec. 18.
