Overview
- Ali confirmed Friday that he has moved on from the Blade reboot and told GQ he believes Marvel “didn’t want to do it,” ending his long attachment to the role.
- Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has publicly acknowledged the studio’s failure to bring the Ali-led film to production and said he felt like “a gigantic loser and failure” for not getting it made.
- The project was announced in 2019 and stalled after repeated script rewrites, multiple writers, and two high-profile director exits including Bassam Tariq in 2022 and Yann Demange in 2024, with the 2023 industry strikes adding further delays.
- Ali spent more than a year training for the role and says he used that preparation in a new original film with Tariq, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which is slated to premiere at Toronto in September.
- The Blade character has continued to appear in MCU-related works without Ali, including his 2021 Eternals voice cameo, Wesley Snipes’s return in Deadpool & Wolverine, and an animated Blade modeled on Ali in Marvel Zombies.