Marvel’s Kevin Feige has talked about the long-delayed Blade reboot. It’s going to happen, he says, with Mahershala Ali still in the lead. Despite all the delays, abandoned sets, props and script ideas, Blade isn’t dead. That’s according to Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, who on the 18th July invited a group of journalists to ... Blade still happening says Kevin Feige
Marvel’s Kevin Feige has talked about the long-delayed Blade reboot. It’s going to happen, he says, with Mahershala Ali still in the lead.
Despite all the delays, abandoned sets, props and script ideas, Blade isn’t dead. That’s according to Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige, who on the 18th July invited a group of journalists to his company headquarters for a lengthy press conference.
It says a great deal about Marvel’s artistic and financial wobbles over the past five years that Feige would stage a ‘state of the union’ address like this. In it, the producer admitted that, at the behest of its parent company Disney, Marvel had tried to make too many movies and TV shows for audiences to keep up with; “For the first time ever,” he said (as reported by Variety), “quantity trumped quality.”
When asked about Blade, a project originally announced almost exactly six years ago, Feige said it’s still going to be made and that Mahershala Ali is “still attached” as the title character.
By the sounds of things, Marvel has spent the last six years rather overthinking how it should relaunch Blade, a film franchise once headed up by Wesley Snipes.
Of the comic book character, famous for killing vampires and often pictured wearing black leather while doing so, Feige 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.”
Read more: Blade | A brief history of Marvel’s troubled reboot
With that uniqueness in mind, at least one version of the script imagined Blade as a period piece, with a draft by Stacy Osei-Kuffour almost going into production in early 2022. Reports at the time suggested it was set in the 1920s, and that Mia Goth was set to star as Lilith, a vampire who wanted “the blood of Blade’s daughter.”
That production abruptly fell apart just before cameras rolled, however, with director Bassim Tariq leaving behind several completed sets and costumes. Those costumes soon found a home, though – on director Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
“We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production,” Feige said, perhaps referring to Blade’s abrupt stop three years ago. “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.”
Now, however, Feige and his team have decided to abandon the period setting idea – perhaps because Coogler’s already made vampire film with a similar backdrop – and moved Blade back to the present.
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“We’ve landed on modern day… and that’s what we’re focusing on,” Feige said.
With Fantastic Four: First Steps a few days away and Avengers: Doomsday due in 2026, Marvel appears to be drawing a line under the past five years and looking to the future. Feige says there’ll be fewer TV shows just one per year) a slate of three films per year at most, and an effort to reduce budgets.
As for Blade, the project hasn’t been scrapped but it’s without a script, a director or a release date. Still, it does have a title star, at least for now. “Call Marvel,” Ali told Variety when asked about the long-delayed film. “I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready.”
