Five years after Mahershala Ali was announced as the new Blade, Marvel’s reboot is still at large. We take a brief look at its troubled production.
One of Marvel Studios’ most important comic book characters is also its most frustratingly elusive. When Wesley Snipes brought the human-vampire hybrid Blade to the screen in 1998, the MCU was over a decade away, and Marvel’s previous attempts at getting its comic book characters into cinemas – including 1986’s Howard The Duck and 1989’s The Punisher – were major disappointments.
Blade, on the other hand, was a solid hit: a big-screen version of the character that was charismatic, tough, and perfectly suited for the cyber-goth late 1990s era. Like The Matrix, released the following year, director Stephen Norrington’s Blade was full of noirish shadows, black leather, slow-mo action and pounding music. The result was a box office success big enough to warrant two sequels – 2002’s Blade II and 2004’s Blade: Trinity.
In the 20 years after Trinity’s release, however, Marvel has done remarkably little with a superhero who was so pivotal to its early movie success. While the rights to the character still resided with New Line in the 2000s, there was talk of a prequel trilogy, headed up by Norrington and starring Stephen Dorff, again playing the villain Deacon Frost from the first movie. It never happened; instead, New Line created a short-lived TV series in 2006, which starred Kirk ‘Sticky Fingaz’ Jones as Blade.
By 2012, when the rights to Blade were returned to Marvel, the MCU was well and truly established: what became known as phase one had concluded with team-up extravaganza The Avengers, one of the biggest box office hits of all time. But as Marvel and its characters began to dominate 21st century pop culture, Blade remained curiously absent from the conversation. Marvel was said to have completed a script for a new Blade movie in 2013, and Snipes was reportedly in talks to play the vampire hunter once again.
Establishing a pattern that would repeat in the coming years, that project failed to come together – and neither did another Blade TV series, which Marvel announced in 2015.
It was in 2019 that the prospects of a new Blade movie seemed to take a more positive turn. On the 20th July that year, Mahershala Ali emerged to an ecstatic San Diego Comic-Con crowd as it was announced that he would play the Daywalker in a reboot of the franchise. Having won an Oscar for his work in Moonlight three years earlier, Ali was ideally placed to bring some dramatic heft to Blade – he also had form when it came to comic book adaptations, having appeared as Cottonmouth in Marvel’s Netflix series, Luke Cage.
If Ali’s casting announcement made it sound as though work on a new movie was about to begin in earnest, however, those hopes would soon dwindle. It was two years before a director and writer were attached to the project – respectively, Bassam Tariq (Mogul Mowgli) and Stacy Osei-Kuffour, one of the screenwriters on HBO’s Watchmen series.
By early 2022, Marvel announced that Delroy Lindo and Aaron Pierre (who’ll be seen in next month’s Rebel Ridge) had joined the cast, and more promisingly, that filming was imminent. Its shoot would begin in October, with Blade’s release set for November 2023.
A matter of weeks before cameras were due to roll, however, Tariq abruptly left the production, simply stating, “We were able to put together a killer cast and crew. Eager to see where the next director takes the film.”
That departure was so sudden that the production was said to have gotten as far as building set-pieces ready for the shoot, including a “massive train set”, according to a recent report by The Hollywood Reporter.
There were problems behind the scenes, evidently, and a seeming disagreement over what direction Blade’s story should take. There were rumours for a while that it would be a period piece set in the 1920s, and that Mia Goth would play a vampire named Lilith, a villain who’s after “the blood of Blade’s daughter”, again according to THR.
Numerous writers – perhaps as many as seven at the latest count – have come and gone in the two years since Tariq left the production. Writer Beau DeMayo, who created the hit animated series X-Men ‘97 before he was suddenly fired on the eve of that show’s release, took a pass at the script. Ali, who’s said to have considerable creative sway over the Blade reboot, brought in True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto – Ali having co-starred in the thriller series’ third season. It’s said the pair had decided to move the story’s action back to the present day.
Even taking into account the twin blows of the 2020 global pandemic and the 2023 Hollywood strikes, Blade’s production has been unusually ill-starred. Director Yann Demange was hired in late 2022, and Marvel’s Kevin Feige said early the following year that filming was due to begin in a matter of weeks – the aim being to have the finished film in cinemas for the 6th September 2024.
Again, it didn’t happen, and instead, yet more screenwriters came and went, including Michael Starrbury and Michael Green. A Variety report from last year suggested that one of the many script drafts saw Ali’s vampire hunter “relegated to the fourth lead” and was instead “led by women and filled with life lessons.”
Whether that was exactly true or not, it at least chimed with the fractious state Marvel had found itself in last year, with a string of its movies and shows – including She-Hulk, Eternals and The Marvels – failing to land with audiences, and actor Jonathan Majors’ conviction for assault driving a bulldozer through the studio’s plans to have him play the villain in a future Avengers movie.
Even as Marvel has found itself on surer ground with the box office success of Deadpool & Wolverine, the new Blade movie is still struggling to coalesce. With the latest attempt to get it into production disrupted by the strikes in 2023, it was again shut down; Demange left the project in June 2024, and actors including Aaron Pierre and Delroy Lindo were released from their contracts. It’s currently unclear whether Mia Goth will still play a part, although she did address the situation to Deadline in June.
Mahershala Ali has still been making positive noises about playing Blade in interviews, but from an outside perspective, it doesn’t look as though the movie is any closer to happening than it was five years ago. Ali is said to be frustrated by the endless delays, while even the actor’s attorney, Shelby Weiser, sounds irked by the situation. Pointing out in June that her client had signed a deal with Marvel five years earlier and still had no film to show for it, Weiser sighed that it was “pretty much the craziest thing in my professional experience.”
Once pencilled in for release next year, Blade is nowhere to be seen on Marvel’s slate of films scheduled for 2025. In the meantime, yet another screenwriter has been given the seemingly difficult task of coming up with a Blade script: Eric Pearson, who’s just written another reboot – The Fantastic Four: First Steps, out next year.
Assuming it happens at all, a new Blade film isn’t likely to emerge until 2026 at the absolute earliest. All of which means that, despite years of planning, work and announcements, the closest we’ve come to seeing the Blade return to the screen in recent years are a pair of brief cameos in Marvel’s other output. For now, the Daywalker – a character so pivotal to Marvel’s big screen history – remains lost in the shadows.
