Amid the celebration over Ryan Gosling’s Ghost Rider casting and a new Black Panther, one announcement that didn’t come out of Marvel’s Comic-Con panel was an update on the long-delayed Blade movie with Mahershala Ali. That’s because, according to the actor in a new interview, he’s “moved on” from the reboot about the vampire-slaying antihero.
Marvel first announced plans to bring Blade into the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the 2019 Comic-Con, with Ali cast to fill the leather jacket previously worn by Wesley Snipes in a trio of pre-MCU films. Ali’s Blade even made an off-screen end-credits cameo in 2021’s Eternals, but it’s been all false starts, a carousel of directors, and script rewrites since then.
Seven years later, with Marvel no closer to bringing Blade back to the big screen and the character itself no longer in their Doomsday plans — and with Snipes himself reprising the role in Deadpool & Wolverine — Ali voiced his frustration with the whole process in a new interview with GQ that closes his door on Blade.
“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me,” Ali said. “If [Marvel] wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”
Ali added of Marvel, an offshoot of Disney, “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.”
While Marvel hasn’t officially killed the project — Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige promised Blade would enter the MCU after the film was removed from Marvel’s upcoming release schedule last year — Feige admitted in an interview this month that the inability to make Blade happen with Ali made him feel “like a gigantic loser and failure.”
From Rolling Stone US
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