Blade is still coming!
Marvel boss Kevin Feige addressed Mahershala Ali’s long-delayed debut as a vampire slayer in the film during a recent interview with journalists.
“Mahershala is still attached,” he said at Marvel Studios on Friday (July 18), addressing the role originated onscreen by Wesley Snipes.
Click through to find out why it’s not out yet…
Kevin Feige joked about the reason why Blade was delayed, referring to Sinners, before giving a real answer.
“The obstacle was, Ryan Coogler called and said, ‘We’d love some costumes for Sinners,” he joked, referring to costumes created by Ruth E. Carter for an abandoned Blade film that Marvel commissioned, then sold back to the designer for Ryan‘s hit vampire movie.
“And we said, ‘Take ‘em man, no problem’ — he’s a good friend — ‘Take our costumes. We’ll hold off on the movie.’”
Taking a serious turn, Kevin then said the Blade delay was due to Marvel’s “over-expansion” in response to Disney’s mandate to produce more content for Disney+.
He hesitated to use a “dramatic” term like “fallout” to characterize the resulting situation, but “for the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” he said.
“We had spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga, saying, ‘That’s never going to happen to us.’” he said.
“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.”
The Blade movie was announced in 2019 and originally intended to hit theaters in November 2023.
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” he explained. “It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time.”
“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,” he said.
Click through to find out when the movie will be set, and why there were four versions…
Director Bassam Tariq exited the project in September 2022, roughly two months before filming was set to begin. Yann Demange signed on to direct, only to exit the film in June 2024. There is currently no director attached.
Several screenwriters have also been announced through the years.
Kevin told Variety there have been “three or four” iterations of the story, and two of which were period pieces.
“We’ve landed on modern day. Which is why we could give those costumes back to Ruth, and that’s what we’re focusing on,” he went on to explain.
As for whether he regrets announcing the film in 2019, he said: “Only in hindsight, I do. But I don’t. Because that’s the way we’d announced everything before, like that and had not not delivered.”
He then pointed to the “tremendous amount of curveballs” the studio faced between 2019 and today, including the pandemic and strike delays, as well as “friends and stars dying; and storylines shifting people because people didn’t respond to them the way we wanted to; and then, with Kang, actors [Jonathan Majors] falling out of our ability to use them.”
Find out what he said about characters being recast, and when.
