“Mahershala Ali is still attached,” Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirmed at a press event on July 18 (via Variety), bringing some clarity to the long-awaited new “Blade” entry in the MCU.
Just last month, while promoting “Jurassic World Rebirth,” Ali was evasive while discussing the project. “Leave me out of it,” Ali said when his “Jurassic World” co-stars Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Bailey attempted to prod him on a Marvel-related trivia question. “That’s a Scarlett question.” In a separate interview with Variety at the “Rebirth” premiere, he said. “Call Marvel… I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready.”
Now, Feige says the project, originally set for release November 2025, says that Marvel simply got weighed down with projects due to the “over-expansion” of the brand. With the increased demand for product, Feige explained, “for the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality.”
“We had spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga, saying, ‘That’s never going to happen to us.’ We always had more characters that people were asking about than we could possibly make, because we weren’t going to make a movie a month — that’s crazy. Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more, and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ … But maybe that’s what we fell into,” he lamented.
Feige went on to explain that they didn’t want to “just put a leather outfit on [Ali] and have him start killing vampires.” Instead, Marvel Studios wanted something “unique,” and Feige added of the initial scripts, “It wasn’t insanely great at the time.”
So, despite Ali’s casting announcement in 2019 and his brief voice cameo in 2021’s “Eternals,” the two-time Oscar-winning actor has yet to take on the role originated on film by Wesley Snipes.
“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 concluded.
The most significant update regarding “Blade” this year actually made it seem like the project might be dead. Earlier this month, it was revealed that the movie “Sinners” used period costumes that were originally procured by costume designer Ruth Carter for “Blade.” Before he revealed the actual status of the production, Feige joked that this was the reason “Blade” was on hold.
“The obstacle was, Ryan Coogler called and said, ‘We’d love some costumes for ‘Sinners,’” Feige joked. “And we said, ‘Take ’em man, no problem’ — he’s a good friend — ‘take our costumes. We’ll hold off on the movie.’”
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