Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige is expressing disappointment over the failed “Blade” reboot that was supposed to star Mahershala Ali as the legendary vampire slayer. Speaking on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Feige said bluntly: “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.” Although the studio chief admitted at the same time it was “very exciting” to have Wesley Snipes back as Blade in 2024’s “Deadpool and Wolverine.”
Marvel originally announced its “Blade” movie with Ali in July 2019. Bassam Tariq was the first director to join the movie, but he exited in September 2022 roughly two months before it was set to begin shooting. Several screenwriters came and went during development, from “Watchmen” scribe Stacy Osei-Kuffour to Michael Starrbury. Yann Demange stepped in as the movie’s director after Tariq’s exit, but Demange ended up dropping out in June 2024.
Variety reported in November 2023 that “Blade” had gone through at least five writers. One person familiar with the script changes said the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Speculation at the time said that Marvel was still looking to make the film but on a budget of less than $100 million. Marvel Studios officially took “Blade” off its release calendar in fall 2024.
Amid the film’s development struggles, Ali’s interest in playing Blade has never wavered. He told Variety on the “Jurassic World Rebirth” red carpet last summer: “I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready.”
Speaking to press in July 2025, Feige explained how the prolonged delays on “Blade” were a symptom of Marvel’s “over-expansion” into Disney+ streaming content where “for the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality.” When Marvel began to reevaluate its development process, the “Blade” movie 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. 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.”
