Marvel announced six years ago, at San Diego Comic-Con 2019, that they were inviting Blade into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with a new reboot. It still has yet to launch, but Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige promises that it’s still happening.
It’s no secret that Marvel has struggled immensely to launch a new Blade movie, which has been bumped all over the release calendar the last few years. That’s also not helped when it comes to retaining talent behind the camera. The movie is without a director at the moment, with Yann Demange (“Lovecraft Country”) departing the project in the wake of Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli) exiting the film back in 2022.
One constant that remains is star Mahershala Ali, who’s still committed to playing Blade. “Call Marvel,” Ali told Variety during the promotional tour of Jurassic World Rebirth. “I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready.”
Feige re-confirmed that the actor is still attached and reflected on the reboot’s troubled launch, citing to Variety the trap of emphasizing quantity of the ever-expanding MCU above story. When they began to re-evaluate their approach, Blade was stalled. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” Feige explained to Variety. “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.”
He added, “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.”
There is currently no director attached to Blade, but Feige provided one detail that does signal some forward momentum, if slight.
The troubled film, at one point, enlisted costume designer Ruth E. Carter for a scrapped shoot that would’ve put Blade in the same era as Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. When that fell through, Carter bought back the costumes for Coogler’s film. The MCU has since moved on from a period setting for its reboot.
“We’ve landed on modern day,“ Feige confirmed. “Which is why we could give those costumes back to Ruth, and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
It seems as though both Feige and Ali aren’t letting this project go, despite its many setbacks. Stay tuned.
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