Marvel Studios Kevin Feige gave an update on where the company currently stands with “Blade,” telling TheWrap alongside a group of reporters on Friday the studio “didn’t feel confident” in the script, highlighting that there have been four versions of the project as it became a casualty of a push for quantity over quality.
Mahershala Ali is still attached to star as the half-human vampire hunter, Feige confirmed, while openly admitting that the company’s recent struggles stem from prioritizing quantity over quality, and “Blade” was a consequence of that Disney-mandated expansion to fill up Disney+.
“We had spent 12 years working on the ‘Infinity Saga’ saying that’s never going to happen to us. And 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” Feige said. “Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ and it led to the to the expansion and ‘Blade’ came up with that as well.”
Feige acknowledged that the studio produced “too much” content during the Disney+ push. “We made maybe 51 hours of stories between 2007 and 2019. So 12 or 13 years for 51 hours of stories. In the six years since, we’ve had well over 100 hours of stories in half the time. That’s too much,” he said.
As it came time to make “Blade,” Marvel had already started pulling back and Feige noted that the company didn’t feel confident in the “Blade” script so they pushed pause. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique and it fell right into the time when we started pulling back and saying ‘only accept insanely great’ and it wasn’t insanely great at the time,” Feige said.
Feige added that Marvel typically improves scripts during production, but felt this approach wouldn’t work for “Blade.”
“And we didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can start and have a good script and make it a great script through production,” Feige said. “We didn’t feel confident that we could that on ‘Blade’ and didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and do want to do that to us.”
It was previously reported that “Blade” would be a period piece. Feige confirmed that a version of the script previously took place in the 30s but they landed on a modern day take.
“There were three or four, two that were period two that are not. We’ve landed on modern day and that’s what we’re focusing on,” Feige said.
Marvel veteran writer Eric Pearson, who most recently worked on “Fantastic Four,” is currently working on the “Blade” script. Michael Starrbury, Nic Pizzolatto and Michael Green wrote previous drafts of the script.
“Blade” has had several setbacks since first being announced at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con, and now, more than ever, Marvel does not want to rush something into production that isn’t ready. The “Blade” movies were deeply important to the Marvel brand back in the late 1990s/early 2000s and the team feels an incredible amount of responsibility and pressure to crack the character and story.
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