Mahershala Ali confirmed that his Blade reboot has been cancelled.
He called out Marvel over the scrapping.
Earlier, Marvel chief Kevin Feige lamented the film not moving forward.
The two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali has specified that his Blade reboot is no longer going forward. The star of Moonlight and Green Book had been attached to play Marvel’s vampire-hunting antihero in 2019. The role had originally been played by Wesley Snipes in three films between 1998 and 2004.
Marvel first declared plans to rope Blade into the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the 2019 Comic-Con, with Ali cast to fill the leather jacket previously worn by Wesley Snipes in a trio of pre-MCU films. Ali’s Blade even made an off-screen end-credits cameo in 2021’s Eternals, but it’s been all false starts, a changing row of directors, and script rewrites since then.
Mahershala Ali Opens Up On Blade Cancellation
The film was at one stage set to be helmed by the Mogul Mowgli film-maker Bassam Tariq. Ali and Tariq have since worked together on the revenge thriller Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which is premiering at this year’s Toronto film festival.
“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me,” Ali said. “If [Marvel] wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on."
He added in the GQ interview, “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,” Ali told GQ. “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.”
Ali added of Marvel, an offshoot of Disney, “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.”
