It’s been a very messy 5 years for Mahershala Ali’s Blade movie

We gotta ask: Which person involved in the production of Marvel’s eternally gestating Blade revival pissed in God’s cornflakes? Earlier this month, we reported that director Yann Demange—who’d been hand-picked by star Mahershala Ali to serve as the new director of Marvel’s (supposedly) upcoming revival of the vampire-hunting badass franchise—had dropped out of the long-gestating project. Now, THR has a new report diving deeper into the behind-the-scenes issues plaguing the superhero film, which was announced waaaaay back in 2019, and which has now gone five whole years without ever actually shooting a frame of film.

The piece starts by noting that Blade has always been a little bit of a weird project, just because of how it got started: Ali, fresh off winning an Oscar for Green Book (as well as a very critically applauded Marvel run as one of the bad guys of Netflix’s Luke Cage show), reportedly called up Kevin Feige and his people and said “Hey, let’s make a Blade movie.” Given that Ali is both a great actor and a big Hollywood name, Feige and co. apparently shrugged, said, “Sure,” and then brought him out with the rest of their slate at Comic-Con in 2019, at the big show where Marvel, riding its post Avengers: Endgame high, announced basically everything they’d end up making over the next five years.

And then… Nothin’! Sure, there was that weird voice cameo at the end of Eternals, where Ali, off-camera, asks Jon Snow if he really wants to grab a magic sword. But despite many, many Marvel film and TV projects having come and gone since that big convention appearance (and at least one time where Feige said “No, seriously, we’re gonna start shooting like next month”) Blade has never moved forward. It’s enough to get Ali’s attorney, Shelby Weiser, to talk a little shit in Disney’s direction in a recent interview, saying, “That deal was in 2019, and they still haven’t shot it, which is pretty much the craziest thing in my professional experience.”

Along the way, Blade has gone through a ton of different writers, directors, and concepts—including, fascinatingly, a pitch for a period piece version written by Beau De Mayo, now better known for his work on X-Men ’97. That’s been discarded now, of course, along with original director Bassam Tariq; THR also notes that Marvel built a whole train station set for the movie at one point, for Tariq’s version, that now isn’t getting used, although it might end up being utilized by some other Marvel project. (And now we’re going to be watching every Marvel project like hawks, trying to figure out which bit is the repurposed Blade train station.) Big chunks of the cast have been first acquired, and then let out of their contracts, although Mia Goth is reportedly still attached to play its bad guy, presumably because she is extremely good casting for a Blade villain.

And that’s to say nothing of the screenwriters who have moved through the project, including De Mayo, True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto (who, like Demange, was an example of Ali basically dictating terms on the project), Logan’s Michael Green, and now steady studio hand Eric Pearson, who also worked on Thor: Ragnarok and Black Widow. Meanwhile, the studio has been accused by some sources of treating Blade as a lower priority, letting it get lost amidst the shuffle of its over-glut of projects as Marvel moved into streaming. (Also: The pandemic, and the strikes, and the general fall-off of Marvel’s fortunes in the last few years.) The company line is now that Marvel is just trying to take its time and not rush the project, even as its absence from the studio’s calendar has become increasingly notable.

A Blade script will supposedly be done by this summer, and then shopped out to whoever its potential third director will end up being.