Mahershala Ali Says He Doesn’t Know Why ‘Blade’ Didn’t Happen

When Marvel announces a movie, it tends to get made. It might go through a change of creative direction — as something like the original Ant-Man did when Edgar Wright was replaced by Peyton Reed — but it odds are, a movie will emerge from the studio eventually.

That’s not the case with Blade, which was formally announced way back in 2019 at San Diego Comic-Con with Oscar winner Mahershala Ali in the title role. Seven years later, the movie hasn’t just not happen, it appears like it will never happen, a genuinely surprising turn of events.

For his part, Ali has no answers as to why the film did not happen despite the fanfare of the big announcement at Comic-Con. In a new interview with GQ, Ali was asked about the reason why he never played Blade, to which he said...

That’s a Kevin Feige question ... They had, as you said, a two-time Oscar-winning actor under contract and you got billions of dollars. That’s a question for them. I don’t mean anything personal to you, but I don’t know why it didn’t. To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that it was—Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree.

 

New Line

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The Blade character was created in the 1970s by writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan and introduced in the pages of the Marvel horror comic The Tomb of Dracula. He was first played on the big screen in 1998 by Wesley Snipes, who wound up appearing in a trilogy of Blade films from New Line Cinema in the years prior to the official start of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Marvel hired Bassam Tariq to direct their Blade, which reportedly went through a variety of different concepts and drafts from multiple writers; some were rumored to be period pieces, while others were more modern stories. As the film continued its slow development process, Snipes returned to reprise his role as Blade in Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine. Ali, meanwhile, only made a single uncredited cameo as Blade, when his voice was heard in a post-credits scene in 2021’s Eternals.

You can watch Ali’s full conversation with GQ below. The way he talks about the film really makes it seem like it is just not going to happen, now or ever, at least with him as Blade.