Seven years after Mahershala Ali was announced as the new Blade, Marvel’s reboot is effectively dead. 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 ... Blade | A brief history of Marvel’s doomed reboot
Seven years after Mahershala Ali was announced as the new Blade, Marvel’s reboot is effectively dead. 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 22 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.
The early MCU era – no 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.
Arrivals and departures
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 (now a star thanks to 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 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.
In December 2025, Goth briefly spoke about her involvement in Blade on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. Although she doesn’t specify when it happened, she recalls flying to Atlanta Georgia to film a ‘chemistry test’ with Mahershala Ali, and that she’d been for a costume and wig fitting at the same time. She then expressed confusion over the project’s sudden collapse.
“I was very excited in the direction it was going,” Goth said. “It was very cool. And Mahershala had such an interesting take on it, and he was great. And then it just unravelled from there, unfortunately.”
Goth also added that she hadn’t heard anything from Marvel about Blade since.
“I don’t know what’s going on with that,” she said. “I think that they want to make it, and it’s such an important film for them that they’re taking their time with it. I really don’t have any information. I don’t know why it’s taken the time that it has, but we will see.”
Daywalker delays
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 an 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.
Blade’s still sheathed
Ali was said to be frustrated by the endless delays, while even the actor’s attorney, Shelby Weiser, sounded irked by the situation. Pointing out in 2024 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 scheduled for release in November 2025, Blade was removed from Marvel’s schedule, with Disney having placed Predator: Badlands in that autumn slot. Screenwriter Eric Pearson, writer of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, had previously been given the seemingly difficult task of coming up with a new Blade screenplay. A 2025 report suggested that Pearson’s work didn’t please Marvel, either, and the studio had decided to start again from scratch.
In early 2025, The Harder They Fall filmmaker Jeymes Samuels was rumoured to be taking on the role for a while, but he’s since said the reports were untrue. Chad Stahelski was then attached, but mere days after word on that began to circulate, out came a rumour that Marvel has scrapped Blade entirely.
On the 18th July 2025, Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige attempted to put those rumours to bed during a lengthy press conference. He indicated that Blade is still alive and that Mahershala Ali is still attached. The idea of a period piece has been abandoned, he added, with the character now set to slay vampires in a modern setting once again.
All of which means that, despite years of planning, work and announcements, the closest we’ve come to seeing Blade return to the screen are a pair of brief cameos in Marvel’s other output.
In January 2026, rumours of Blade's death surfaced again; according to Hollywood scoop specialist Jeff Sneider, Marvel has decided to scrap the solo outing altogether, and have Mahershala Ali’s antihero show up in the supernatural team-up movie Midnight Sons instead.
Now, even that report sounds over ambitious. Ali said in a July 2026 interview with GQ magazine that he’s ready to move on from Blade and the Marvel superhero machine entirely, arguing that “If they wanted to do it, they would have done it.”
Instead, Ali funnelled the sword fighting skills he picked up in Blade's pre-production into a new action thriller, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, directed by Bassam Tariq – the filmmaker who was supposed to direct Blade in 2022. Ali now says he’s happier to produce ‘original work’, and is clearly ready to draw a line under the seven years he’s spent waiting to play the Daywalker.
“I’d love to do original work that resonates with people and impacts them in unique ways,” Ali said. “So, I’m good. 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… But I feel ready to move on from the Blade questions. Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.”
Ali’s comments can probably be taken as the final word on the Blade saga, or at least this incarnation of it. Days earlier, Kevin Feige admitted that he felt like a “gigantic loser and a failure,” that he and his colleagues simply couldn’t get Ali’s taken on Blade off the ground.
A new film featuring the Eric Cross Brooks will almost certainly emerge from Marvel at some point. But if it does, it won’t star Mahershala Ali.
For now, the Daywalker – a character so pivotal to Marvel’s big screen history – remains lost in the shadows.
