Marvel’s Blade movie somehow loses another director

No movie, in the entire history of Marvel Cinematic Universe films past, present, and future, has given off more “Completely Cursed” vibes than Mahershala Ali’s Blade revival. Formally announced nearly five years ago at this point—with Marvel mastermind Kevin Feige bringing Marvel TV alum Ali out at Comic-Con 2019 as proof of the studio’s commitment—the Blade filming process has produced exactly one line of dialogue in the half-decade since, an off-screen line from Ali that arrived just before the so-far blatantly false promise “The Eternals will return” in the mid-credits sequence of the 2021 film.

Now, The Wrap is reporting that Blade has suffered yet another setback in its long, incredibly arduous trek to the screen, with news breaking today, not long before filming was supposedly finally expected to begin, that director Yann Demange had departed the project. And while the split is being reported as amicable—with Demange having apparently quietly stepped away from the project some time ago—it still leaves Blade with no director and a November 2025 release date just a year-and-a-half away.

It doesn’t help that Demange is the second director to have departed the film, after Bassam Tariq dipped on the film back in 2022—or that the movie has missed multiple reported “We’re starting filming soon, we swear!” dates due to things like last year’s Hollywood strikes. The Wrap reporting frames the whole thing as Marvel being insanely careful not to produce another flop after a disappointing couple of years, but we can’t help but think that the appeal of a Blade movie is pretty goddamn simple: Get the coolest guy you know to shoot and stab vampires in grisly fashion, rig up a couple of rooms with blood sprinklers, call it a day. Built from old Blaxsploitation tropes, and outfitted with a ready-made army of bloodsucking bad guys who no one minds seeing get torn in half, it’s a concept built, as Wesley Snipes proved very successfully, for nasty, visceral action. Blade, the character, has enough depth to him to keep the whole thing from descending completely into silliness—and we’re generally excited to see what Ali can do with the role—but it feels like the kind of thing you don’t need to necessarily overthink.

Anyway, we are not in charge of the parts of the universe that makes Blade movies; Marvel is. We’ll see if they actually manage to hit that November 2025 release date at the rate they’re going.