Mahershala Ali would have been a brilliant Blade. When he was announced to lead Marvel Studios’ reboot of the vampire hunter franchise at San Diego Comic Con in 2019, the room erupted in cheers. His casting was a perfect, natural fit, one fans were more than eager to see based on stellar performances in things like Luke Cage, True Detective, the Hunger Games franchise, and Battle Angel Alita. But after production delays and directors departing the project, the movie seemed cursed and destined never to materialize. Now, in a new interview with GQ, Ali says the movie may still be coming, but he won’t be playing the titular daywalker.
“For whatever reason, that project is not for me,” he said, suggesting the reason for the movie’s failure to launch so far lies with Marvel Studios. “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”
Ali later continued:
So, I’m good. [Laughs.] Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie. When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me. And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for Blade. In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level, just in my own journey between me, myself, and I. But I feel ready to move on from the Blade questions. Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.
In an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast in July, Marvel Studios director Kevin Feige blamed himself for the breakdown, saying that he felt, “like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
Which begs the question: How on Earth did y’all screw that up, Marvel? You had Ali do a voice cameo at the end of The Eternals. You had a director, an eager and perfect lead actor, and were armed with all the blank-check levels of Disney / MCU money a production could ask for at the time. What happened?
The problems started back in 2022 with the departure of the movie’s first director, Bassam Tariq. In 2024, the project lost its second director, Yann Demange. There were also serious problems with the movie’s script. Variety reported that the Blade movie was plagued by creative confusion, with the script undergoing several rewrites, including one where Ali was relegated to a tertiary character in his own movie. And an Ali-led project seemed to be all-but over when Marvel brought back Wesley Snipes to play Blade in Deadpool and Wolverine. You don’t hang out with your ex if you’re trying to make your new relationship work, y’know.
Despite that, Blade will be fine, I guess. There’s a video game allegedly coming out from Arkane Studios. But Arkane is currently in the process of possibly being spun off or shut down because these days, parent company Xbox seems to be in the business of “laying off developers” rather than “letting developers make games.”
Mahershala Ali, though, will definitely be fine. His new action drama Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, made in collaboration with Blade’s first director Bassam Tariq, features him swinging a sword in what is almost certainly a message to audiences saying, “We’re leaving here with something.”
The movie comes to select theaters September 25th.