After years of delays and a general lack of progress, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has finally apologized for their disservice to Blade and Mahershala Ali. On a recent podcast, the producer said,
I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.
Marvel Studios officially announced Blade, a reboot film for the character in the MCU, in July 2019 with Mahershala Ali cast as the titular Blade. In the years that followed, the film received countless delays, being passed around between several screenwriters and directors, never seeming to make it out of the pre-production phase. In 2023, it was reported that the film had already gone through five writers, and Marvel officially took the film off their calendar in 2024.
In a 2025 interview, Feige admitted to cutting back on the sheer quantity of Marvel Studios projects, and Blade was one of the many that did not make the cut. He said,
We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. 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.
Blade did appear in Deadpool & Wolverine in 2024, but that was Wesley Snipes’ version from the late 90s-early 2000s. They even made a joke about the canned Mahershala Ali film, with Blade commenting,
There’s only one Blade, and there’s only ever going to be one Blade.
Marvel just released the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday, and Blade was not present. It may be some time before we see the character again.
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