Despite numerous false starts, Mahershala Ali’s debut as a vampire slayer in “Blade” is still in the works, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige confirmed.
“Mahershala is still attached,” Feige told a roomful of journalists gathered at Marvel Studios on Friday about the project, which would see the two-time Oscar winner assume the role originated onscreen by Wesley Snipes, who played the part in the late ’90s and 2000s, as well as in 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.” “The obstacle was, Ryan Coogler called and said, ‘We’d love some costumes for ‘Sinners,’” he joked, referring to costumes created by Ruth E. Carter for an abandoned “Blade” film that Marvel commissioned, then sold back to Carter for Coogler’s vampire movie. “And we said, ‘Take ‘em man, no problem’ — he’s a good friend — ‘Take our costumes. We’ll hold off on the movie.’”
In all seriousness, Feige explained, the prolonged delays on “Blade” were a symptom of Marvel’s “over-expansion” — how the executive characterizes the studio’s response to Disney’s mandate to produce more content at the onset of the Disney+ streaming service. Feige hesitated to use a “dramatic” term like “fallout” to characterize the resulting situation, but “for the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” he said, echoing similar comments made recently by Disney CEO Bob Iger.
“We had spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga, saying, ‘That’s never going to happen to us.’” Feige said. “We always had more characters that people were asking about than we could possibly make, because we weren’t going to make a movie a month — that’s crazy. Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more, and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ … But maybe that’s what we fell into.”
So, as Marvel began to reevaluate its development process, the “Blade” movie — which was announced in 2019 and originally intended to hit theaters in November 2023 — was one of the projects that stalled.
“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 explained. “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.”
He continued: “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.”
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“Blade” was originally set to begin shooting in 2022, but director Bassam Tariq (“Mogul Mowgli”) exited the project in September, roughly two months before cameras were supposed to roll. Yann Demange (“White Boy Rick”) then signed on to direct, only to exit the film in June 2024. There is currently no director attached. Ali insists he’s still game.
“Call Marvel,” Ali told Variety last month at the New York premiere of his new film “Jurassic World Rebirth.” When asked when “Blade” production could start, he replied: “I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready.”
Several screenwriters have also been announced through the years, from “Watchmen” scribe Stacy Osei-Kuffour to Michael Starrbury. Feige told Variety there have been “three or four” iterations of the “Blade” story, two of which were period pieces. “We’ve landed on modern day,” Feige confirmed. “Which is why we could give those costumes back to Ruth, and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
Speaking of “Sinners,” despite the internet’s desire to see it, Feige said Coogler is not in the running to helm the picture (and seemed surprised that anyone was pushing for that to happen). The filmmaker has “Black Panther 3” to focus on, which Feige confirmed is in progress, though no date has been revealed. “We know [when on the timeline it is], and if he’s telling you he doesn’t, that’s perfect,” Feige said with a knowing smile.
So, after all this, does Feige regret announcing the project during Marvel Studios’ Hall H presentation at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019?
“Only in hindsight, I do,” Feige said. “But I don’t. Because that’s the way we’d announced everything before, like that and had not not delivered.”
Feige then pointed to the “tremendous amount of curveballs” the studio faced between 2019 and today; there were the hurdles that affected the entire industry, like the COVID-19 pandemic and strike delays, as well as Marvel-specific tribulations, like “friends and stars dying; and storylines shifting people because people didn’t respond to them the way we wanted to; and then, with Kang, actors [Jonathan Majors] falling out of our ability to use them.”
From Variety US