There’s a trailer out now for Avengers Doomsday, which has everyone thinking about the MCU again, and the many, many, many characters they have to keep track of in it. But one guy you won’t see anywhere in the Doomsday trailer is Blade, whose dedicated film has been in production hell for at least seven years at this point. In fact, it’s been in limbo for so long that Marvel president and creative lead Kevin Feige seems kind of embarrassed about it in a recent cryptic remark about the project’s current status.
This comes from an interview with Josh Horowitz on Happy Sad Confused, in a snippet published to Instagram today. In it, Feige is asked a fairly vague “How are you doing?” with regard to the “poor, poor project” of Blade. Feige responds by asking if they should “get into a therapy session,” before offering two thoughts: “I’m feeling very excited that we got Wesley back for a time in Deadpool and Wolverine, and like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
The first half of this isn’t hard to parse. We recently saw actor Wesley Snipes, who played the character in his 1998 big-screen debut, reappear as Blade in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2023. However, this was in the midst of a far more complicated situation around what was supposed to be a new Blade movie. In 2019, Marvel announced that a new vampire hunter film starring Mahershala Ali was in development, and Ali’s voice can be heard as Blade very briefly in Eternals. The film has theoretically been in development since then, but has gone through multiple directors and even more script writers, and it was removed from Disney’s release calendar entirely back in October of 2024.
The last official word on the film was from Mia Goth, who said in an interview with Elle last October that she was still attached to it for the role of Lilith. But more alarming were rumors earlier this year that the film had been, as many feared, essentially canceled in favor of a Midnight Sons movie that would incorporate Blade instead. This all leaves a certain amount of mystery around Feige’s comment here. When he says “didn’t get off the ground,” does he mean that the film itself was a failure and Marvel is moving on? Or is he just alluding to the multiple false starts?
It’s unclear if Horowitz followed up with Feige from the short teaser given on Instagram—we’ll have to wait for the full podcast to see if there’s a more complete answer or if this is just another cryptic crumb around a film we may never see.