Where Marvel’s Blade has faltered, its costumes found a second life in another period horror: Ryan Coogler’s vampire hit, Sinners.
One of 2025’s most acclaimed genre hits, Sinners was such a hit that even its own studio seemed taken by surprise. But in a fascinating glimpse behind the creative curtain, producer Sev Ohanian recently revealed that Ryan Coogler’s horror has a previously hidden connection to another toothsome production: Marvel’s Blade.
You may recall that Marvel has spent over five years trying to reboot the Blade franchise, with Oscar winner (and Jurassic World Rebirth star) Mahershala Ali in the titular vampire hunter role. One iteration of the troubled production, headed up by director Bassim Tariq, was a period piece set in the 1920s – this was likely around the year 2022 or 2023. That incarnation of the film got so close to filming that sets had been built and costumes designed by Ruth Carter – but then Marvel pulled the plug.
Carter then moved over to Coogler’s own period vampire film, and she came up with the idea of asking Marvel if the unused Blade costumes could be purchased for use on Sinners.
“She happened to have a warehouse full of period-appropriate clothes,” Ohanian told ScreenCrush, “and it was like, ‘Yo, we got to shoot this movie like tomorrow.’ And Marvel was generous enough and kind enough to let us basically purchase it at price.”
Don’t go looking for those Blade outfits on lead performers like Michael B Jordan or Hailee Steinfeld, however: Ohanian pointed out that the costumes were only used on background actors. The rest of the clothes were designed specifically for Sinners.
Read more: Blade | A brief history of Marvel’s troubled reboot
This is far from the only time the collapse of one production has seen unused outfits and set-pieces emerge in another movie. Jean Claude Van Damme’s 1989 action vehicle Cyborg, directed by Albert Pyun, was born from the ashes of a doomed Spider-Man movie and a cancelled sequel to Masters Of The Universe.
Production company Cannon Films was in all sorts of financial trouble at the time, and when it was forced to scrap its Spider-Man film, having already built sets and designed costumes, Pyun spent a weekend writing a script that could make use of them.
Similarly, director Neill Blomkamp was working on an adaptation of the videogame Halo in the early 2000s. When that got cancelled, he took the unused sci-fi props and put them in his 2009 sci-fi allegory, District 9.
Not all filmmakers are fans of this kind of upcycling, however. When he finished 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick famously had most of the film’s miniatures and props destroyed in order to prevent them from appearing in someone else’s B-movie.
As for Blade, Marvel’s long-planned reboot is still missing, presumed dead. The studio hasn’t confirmed its status either way; when the subject of Marvel movies came up in a recent interview, Mahershala Ali replied with a terse, “Leave me out of it.”
A tip of the hat to Variety for bringing this story to our attention.
