Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has revealed the reason behind the years-long delay of its Blade reboot – find out more below.
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Marvel first announced that it would be rebooting Blade, with Moonlight star and Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali in the lead role, back in 2019 at San Diego Comic-Con.
Since then, the film has faced numerous setbacks, cycling through several writers in an attempt to land on a script and make it to production, eventually being removed from Marvel’s release schedule entirely. Several directors have also been attached and dropped out of the project in the years since its announcement.
Despite Ali saying in December 2023 that he was “sincerely encouraged” by the direction the film was heading in after its most recent creative overhaul, Marvel removed Blade from its planned November 2025 release date late last year, and haven’t announced anything regarding it since.
Now, Feige himself has spoken about the troubled project to a roomful of journalists last Friday (July 18), per Variety. First off, Feige has confirmed that Ali is “still attached” to the project. Earlier this year, it was announced that several of the costumes seen in Ryan Coogler’s acclaimed vampire film Sinners were purchased from the Blade team. Referencing that, Feige joked: “The obstacle was, Ryan Coogler called and said, ‘We’d love some costumes for Sinners. And we said, ‘Take ‘em man, no problem’ — he’s a good friend — ‘Take our costumes. We’ll hold off on the movie.’”
In a more serious note, Feige explained that Marvel was facing a problem of “over-expansion” due to Disney’s orders to produce more film and TV projects in the cinematic universe: “For the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality.”
“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 went on to say. “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.”
Since being announced in 2019, two directors (Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange) came on board and then left the project. In April, Flying Lotus revealed that he was attached to score the Blade reboot for Marvel before it was put on ice indefinitely.
Marvel’s next film will be The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which will release on July 24.
