It seems like everyone, with the exception of perhaps Wesley Snipes, is disappointed that Mahershala Ali’s Blade movie will never happen. Announced at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019 as part of Marvel’s splashy presentation of its upcoming slate, the project stayed on the to-do list through the pandemic, the Hollywood strikes, and multiple director shake-ups.
In late 2024, Marvel boss Kevin Feige was still insisting the studio was “committed to Blade.” But this past July, he finally admitted the movie was not going to “get off the ground with Mahershala.” He also said he was “feeling… like a gigantic loser and a failure” over not being able to make the new Blade happen.
Would-be star Ali is obviously let down over Blade being a bust. But he is also a two-time Oscar winner who’s kept plenty busy with other work, including the blockbuster Jurassic Park Rebirth. Recently, he was able to find a silver lining about the whole Blade situation, saying that the physical training he’d been undergoing to play the character helped enormously while making his new action movie, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother—which also happens to be directed by Bassam Tariq, who had been attached to Blade at one point.
Ali also confirmed that he’s well and truly “done” with Blade, even if Marvel somehow revives the film in the future.
And in a new interview with GQ, Ali responded to Feige’s “loser and failure” remarks.
“I agree with him. I agree with him one hundred percent. One hundred percent,” he said. “He should feel that way. I agree.”
What’s more, “They had, as you said, a two-time Oscar-winning actor under contract, and you got billions of dollars. That’s a question for [Marvel and Feige] … To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen.”
Ali also noted that he wasn’t entirely onboard with the 2019 SDCC announcement, given it was so early in the process.
“I went to them in 2019. That was my first meeting. And we’re at Comic-Con by 2019 in the summer. I didn’t want to make no announcements. I don’t believe in the announcements … all this anticipatory stuff, I’m not a fan of that at all,” he explained. “But they want to do all that. We did all that and had a story greenlit, and then we don’t have any deliverables. I can’t deliver until they deliver. They never delivered. So that’s not a secret. Otherwise, we’d have a movie.”
Ali also reiterated to GQ that he’s “grateful it didn’t happen” now, partially because it freed him up for other things, but also because he now realizes he might not have enjoyed being so closely associated with a single character. “After the whole Marvel announcement, you realize there’s a lot of people who really don’t really know your work like that, but could go, ‘Oh, you’re playing Blade.'”
He was concerned about the idea of “anticipatory fame,” noting, “I had never experienced someone labeling you as a character … before it even comes out. So I feel like just for my nature, I think the blessing in disguise for me is that it sort of removes me out of that space of being. And there’s only one space where people become that type of famous and it’s in the Marvel world. After things began to sort of undo and I had to start divesting energetically, I felt okay about it because in looking back, I really want to be someone who originates things.”
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