In the past few weeks, Marvel Studios has been having an uncharacteristically good run. Though the studio seemingly had a chokehold on the zeitgeist for several consecutive years throughout the 2010s, Marvel has run afoul with audiences time and again throughout the 2020s, with controversies, recastings, and big-budget flops. However, after years of struggling and strife, the past couple of weeks have seen them score some much-needed PR points and re-enter the cultural conversation in some of their most positive lights in years.
At Comic-Con, they debuted new Avengers: Doomsday footage to great acclaim and unveiled plans for a Ryan Gosling-led Ghost Rider film. Then, this past weekend, the Marvel-aided Spider-Man: Brand New Day shattered numerous box office records and netted the second highest-grossing opening weekend of all time.
So clearly, things are turning around for Marvel, right? Well, not exactly. In the midst of these positives, there have also been some extreme new negatives, such as the sudden about-face decision to cancel the critically-acclaimed Wonder Man series (which, for the record, was spearheaded by Destin Daniel Cretton, the same man whose Spider-Man film just earned nearly a billion dollars internationally in a single weekend, but I’m sure that’s an apt way to thank him for his work). But even more notably than that was the ever-swinging Sword of Damocles finally falling, with Mahershala Ali officially confirming that his long-in-gestation Blade movie is entirely off the table.
Ali is an Academy Award-winning actor who, in the prime of his creative life, decided to set the vast majority of his career prospects on the back burner in favor of teaming up with Marvel Studios to turn his dream role into a reality: Blade. Ali was announced to be playing the character in a new Marvel Cinematic Universe-incorporated take all the way back at Comic-Con 2019, just months after the release of the monumental Avengers: Endgame. Ali’s take on Blade was even technically featured in the 2021 film, The Eternals, as an audio-only cameo in that film’s post-credits scene, which was meant to set up his own solo film’s imminent release.
However, said imminent release never actually came, as Ali and Marvel’s brass continued to struggle to come to an agreement on the film’s creative elements. Writers and directors came and went, with the Blade project going through a revolving door of options and infamously starting and stopping pre-production so many different times that numerous pieces of costuming that were hand-made for the film were eventually instead sold off to the production of Sinners to recoup losses.
Now, in a new interview, just a week after Marvel head Kevin Feige admitted he feels like a “loser” for not getting Blade off the ground with Ali yet, the actor is voicing his frustrations with the whole process and confirming he’s done waiting around. “You had me under contract; they have billions of dollars… If they wanted to do it, they would’ve done it.”
While Marvel has certainly had creative plans fall through before in very public ways (looking at you, Kang Dynasty), it has never had a project experience quite as prolonged and embarrassing a death as Blade, where even the attached talent is eager to speak out about how ludicrous the whole process was. Marvel even had original Blade actor Wesley Snipes reprise the role in Deadpool & Wolverine (where he notably and pointedly said, “There’s only ever going to be one Blade”), while Ali was seemingly waiting around for his take to start. So yeah, it’s not exactly hard to see where Ali’s frustrations with the whole process stem from.
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