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Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige recently opened up about the stalled Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali, reflecting candidly on how the project’s lack of traction makes him feel. Ever since the surprise announcement at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019, the production has suffered an endless cycle of delays, lost directors, scrapped screenplays, and abandoned creative visions without making real progress.
Expressing his frustration over the development hell during an appearance on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Feige was remarkably blunt. “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala,” he said. While Feige liked a couple of early story concepts — some aiming for something richer than just having Ali wear a leather trench coat and slice up bloodsuckers — he and the studio could never get a version across the finish line.
Things degraded to the point that Disney finally pulled the film from its release schedule after half a decade in limbo. Aside from online leaks, there are few concrete details about what the various scripts entailed, but the creative direction initially impressed more than just studio execs. Cast members Delroy Lindo and Mia Goth both praised the early vision, only to watch the production unravel and go off the rails.
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Yet, no definitive reason has been given for why getting the Daywalker onto the screen has proven so difficult. Even David Goyer (who penned New Line Cinema’s original Blade trilogy starring Wesley Snipes) thinks it shouldn’t be this hard. Baffled by the constant setbacks, Goyer publicly noted that a Daywalker movie isn’t complicated: it just requires a simple narrative, great action, and a genuinely scary tone.
Instead, the project has remained stuck in neutral for years. Ali’s total screen time as the character across the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe remains a single, off-camera vocal cameo in the post-credits scene of 2021’s Eternals, where he ominously speaks to Kit Harington’s Dane Whitman about taking up the Ebony Blade.
The developmental churn dragged on for so long that an entire warehouse of 1920s-era costumes (assembled by two-time Oscar-winning designer Ruth Carter for one of Blade‘s scrapped period-piece scripts) was eventually bought up at cost by Warner Bros. to clothe the background extras in Ryan Coogler’s 2025 vampire hit Sinners.
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