Mahershala Ali says he's moved on from Marvel's Blade reboot
Two-Time Oscar Winner and One Of the Most Charismatic Men on Earth, Mahershala Ali: PLEASE LET ME DO YOUR SUPERHERO MOVIE, FEATURING ONE OF YOUR MOST RECOGNIZABLE AND DISTINCTIVE REMAINING INACTIVE CHARACTERS!!! Marvel: Hmmm... Nah.
It’s just too high of a concept, Dan. I mean - Blade hates vampires. Blade hunts vampires. How do you possibly make that work?
Hollywood just didn’t get the message from Black Panther and Sinners.
They needed that money for RDJ's dialect coach.
lemme guess... upper management is 100% middle-aged white men.... ammirite?
This is so bizarre to me. They’ve greenlit so much Marvelslop over the years but Blade is the most defensible franchise reboot of the whole universe imo. Like they made Ant man and the Wasp but couldn’t pull the trigger on blade?
Sinners is like such an obvious proof of concept that there’s a big audience for “Black movie star kills vampires”
They also don't even really plan these movies They shoot a bunch of semi-coverage and then piece it together through expensive CG work
They made Werewolf by night, it's not like horror action is impossible for them
Marvel has now officially entered the Star Wars Schrödinger's Project era.
I'm not surprised if Mahershala Ali is rightly pissed off, they grabbed him as Blade hot off an Oscar win, and just kept him waiting and waiting so long that he's hardly done much since, and really cooled off the momentum of his career. And then they didn't even make the bloody thing after all that.
Incidentally, Mahershala Ali's next film is Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which is from the guy that was going to direct Blade, and is going to use his sword training for it. So basically they decided to go off and make their own film if they weren't going to make Blade.
We’ll likely never know what happened, but the fact that Kevin Fiege came right out and said he feels like a “huge loser and failure” over the whole thing tells me it was something BIG and previously unprecedented for the studio.
They didn't keep him waiting though. They were lined up and ready to start production for a 2023 release. But Mahershala wasn't happy with the script and threatened to leave, so they pushed it back and got a new writer. But they just never got a script both parties were happy with.
"The future of Marvel’s long-gestating Blade reboot is somewhat hard to determine these days, but one thing is certain: Mahershala Ali is no longer in it."
Fair. If a project was in development hell as long as Blade has been, to the point where it's actively getting in the way of other projects I want to do, I'd walk away too. Damn shame Marvel couldn't get their act together on this one.
Dang it, this is so disappointing.
"I just wanted to put on a cool coat and fight vampires, and for some reason, Feige was desperate that we not do that."