Delroy Lindo joins Mahershala Ali’s Blade revival
Veteran actor Lindo is only the second person, after Ali, to board the vampire-dusting project
Aux News Mahershala Ali
[Note: This post contains spoilers for the end of Eternals.]
Marvel’s upcoming Blade revival film has just added its second cast member to its roster, and it’s pretty much shooting 2 for 2 so far. Which is to say that Variety reports that TV and film veteran Delroy Lindo is joining the cast of the vampire-hunting flick.
Lindo—whose recent credits include memorable turns on The Good Fight, The Harder They Fall, and Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods—joins a cast list that previously only had one name on, albeit one name that was an Oscar-winning doozy: Star Mahershala Ali. It’s not clear yet who Lindo will be playing as he joins the Blade team, although Variety speculates that he’d be a natural fit for Jamal Afari, the battle-hardened mentor who takes young half-vampire Blade under his wing, and who was transformed into Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler in the Wesley Snipes films.
The Blade revival was originally announced (by Ali) back in 2019, with the actor coming out at the end of Marvel’s big Comic-Con panel that year. (Bringing the character back was apparently predicated largely on Ali’s involvement; he’s the one who made the push to get Marvel’s first real cinematic success story back in front of fans.) Bassam Tariq has been tapped to direct the film, working from a script penned by Watchmen’s Stacy Osei-Kuffour.
Ali is already an MCU veteran of sorts, having played villain Cottonmouth in the now-excised-from-continuity Luke Cage series on Netflix. He made his formal “debut” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe earlier this month, making a brief voice cameo at the end of Eternals. (No word yet on whether Kit Harrington, whose character was the one Blade was addressing in that post-credit sequence, will reprise his role for this new film; Harrington himself has said that he’s hopeful for a second appearance.)
25 Comments
But can he ice-skate?
Uphill both ways.
As much as I love the MCU (to me the interconnectedness is a feature, not a bug), it’d be interesting if they started making disconnected movies about obscure corners of the multiverse. Give interesting directors and writers low budgets and free rein. I realize that the relatively consistent quality and assembly-line nature of the MCU requires a lot of management and oversight, and that they might not want to risk tarnishing the brand if a low-budget one-off shits the bed, but on the other hand they can console themselves with their billions of dollars.
Low budget is kind of the key there. It’s not particularly cheap to make any superhero movie. D+ would be and obvious place to try it but their current model is to make money off of D+ series that interconnect their theatrical releases.
Marvel has tons of superhero IP that would be substantially cheaper than the CGI-heavy extravaganzas. Sure, doing GOTG on the cheap would be hard, but as the Netflix series proved (despite the wildly varying quality of those series) you can do a lot of “street level” stuff without needing huge budgets.
Sure, but the Netflix series also showed that, of the series, only Daredevil and Punisher really fits that mold. Not to take anything away from JJ season 1, which I think is the best of the bunch, but with her, LC and IF they either greatly reduced their abilities or were wildly inconsistent about them because they didn’t have the budget and Netflix just wasn’t willing to pay. JJ and IC are powerhouses in the comics. Like pick up an 18-wheeler and throw it like it’s nothing powerhouses. IF’s punch can destroy most anything. There aren’t really that many characters that would be relatively easy to keep low budget without changing them substantially.
Eh, I suppose you’re right. Still, there’s low budget and there’s low budget. A JJ series where they give enough budget to have her fuck shit up, while keeping it mostly character-focused, still wouldn’t come anywhere near the team-of-500-CGI-artists spectacle that most of the MCU movies cost.Honestly, I didn’t have any problem with the shows making the character less powerful to keep budgets down. It was the unnecessary dragging out of storylines (and, in many cases, extremely dubious characterization and dialogue choices) that were the actual problem.
Agreed about dragging stuff out. In fact, if they would reduced the runtimes to something in the 6-9 episode range they could’ve done much more with the same budgets.
I would imagine at some point they’ll get into the one-shots or content that doesn’t have to tie into the all-powerful ‘continuity’?
I think something like that makes a ton of sense on Disney+
I’d love to see it!
Howard the Duck, but it’s just Birdman 2 with Michael Keaton having hit his head and now thinking he’s a duck.
As much as I love the MCU (to me the interconnectedness is a feature, not a bug), it’d be interesting if they started making disconnected movies about obscure corners of the multiverse.
I agree, and anything we as fans are thinking about, we can sure that Marvel is considering it too. I think they’d like to throw out a Logan, or do one off experiments like Warner/DC. I think Feige experiments as much as he can in the Disney environment. They are demanding immediate, record breaking success so he has to deliver that to get any latitude. A ten year streak of success got him control of tv and print content, and I think its going to take a similar level of success to allow him to develop properties somewhat detached from MCU continuity.
Ali and Osei-Kuffour already had me interested so Lindo is just icing on the cake. And, yes, obviously Harrington’s Black Night is going to be part of it. Black Knight, and the Ebony Blade in particular, have vampire connections in the comics. Vampires during the Crusades protected it, Dracula has always sought it and messed with Black Knight on multiple occasions. I’m just really curious how the MCU is going to explain vampires and fit them into the larger mold of the MCU. Even in the comics it’s ludicrous and there’s loooong spans before a writer is like, “oh, vampires,” as a plot point and brings them back as threat. A huge strength of the MCU was how they were able to “realistically” draw together what ended up being the Avengers in an interconnected way. As it has to now venture into expanding into other characters there are massive implications that come with them that have to be fit into that continuity. Eternals had to come up with some reason that hadn’t appeared before. Now vampires exist? Though that might be an easier hurdle than trying to introduce mutants.
At this point in the MCU, the world has seen so much bizarre shit that people’s reaction to vampires would be, like, “Sure, there may as well be vampires.” Like, half the universe turned to dust that one time, there’s space gods and a guy who turns giant and green. Vampires are, like, whatever. They’ll probably explain it as some kind of genetic disorder, maybe tinged with magic of some kind.
The lead up to half the universe getting dusted, the power of the infinity stones, and Thanos’ intention, were all built up in prior films. It all came together relatively organically over 20 films. Even as “cosmic” they went it all tied together. Now Marvel Studios is in the situation of expanding their character roster and trying to fit in explanations of why any of the prior characters wouldn’t have been aware of these already existing people or threats. It gets a bit messy. I guess we’ll see if the movie going public has the same propensity to accept the retcons and wooly logic that comics have had to do out of necessity.
I’d be curious, since as you said there’s been no reference to vampires existing in the MCU, whether they’ll kinda lampshade it with the whole “oh they came through via the multiverse.”
Certainly a possibility. I wouldn’t be surprised if the choice to introduce the multiverse at this stage of the game was specifically intended to give Marvel Studios easier options to introduce new characters and ideas without hugely contradicting prior films.
they’re just gonna go ‘this is how it’s always been, there’s always been vampires, they live in the shadows. we know the truth.’ and move on just like they’ve always done when they retroactively introduce something. highly doubt they’ll spend much time ‘explaining’ it.
There’ll be a flashback where we find out Obadiah Stane was a vampire or whatever.
Blade has been part of Jason Aaron’s current Avengers lineup in the comics for a couple years now. I like it and would be interested in seeing him in an Avengers film.
I’m pleasantly surprised that Delroy Lindo is still around. I don’t follow cinema as much as I used to, and in the 90’s and early 00’s anything that he was in was a must watch. I would love to see him and Ron Perlman in a film together. I think my head would explode in sheer joy.Ving Rhames as well. With him in that film my body would explode like a vampire in sunlight.
I know that Whistler was somewhat of a concession to include a white character on the hero team (its not part of comics canon) but I liked that inherent racial tension in the relationship between Blade and Whistler and the subtlety in how the actors depicted it. The two characters came from very different worlds — Blade’s blackness is very separate from Whistler— but they trust and support each other like family. I love Delroy Lindo, so I’m excited the filmmakers are going in a different direction, but its worth noting that Snipes and Kristoferson did some really good work.
If the new catchphrase is something about sesame cake I’m in.
He’s got a friend he nicknamed “Sesame Cake” and when a vampire is about to lean in and bite him, Delroy comes out of the shadows and says, “Stop eating my Sesame Cake!”
Ali and Lindo? That’s great casting. Disney better not fuck this up.
My hope is that Mr. Lindo gets to play Jamal Afari, a blues musician who is also a veteran vampire hunter. In this case, my suggestion for those who may be expecting him to play “another” character connected to the Blade mythos is for Jamal’s nickname to be “The Whistler”. New Line/Warner could not sue over that. (Whistler was an original character in David Goyer’s Blade script; as such, Warner claimed copyright over that character; he has never appeared in the comics beyond a movie adaptation one-shot).https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Jamal_Afari_(Earth-616)