It’s been a pretty big seven days for Marvel Studios between Ghost Rider and Black Panther III announcements, the release of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and the casting of Samara Weaving as Emma Frost in Jake Schreier’s upcoming X-Men movie. And it’s been a pretty long seven years for Marvel Studios when it comes to the studio’s tumultuous efforts to bring Blade to the MCU. Now, seven years after being cast as the vampire-slaying Daywalker, two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali has spoken out and offered his view on the seemingly cursed project.
Speaking to GQ ahead of the release of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a project that actually came together after director Bassam Tariq exited Blade (and, as luck would have it, also happens to star Mahershala Ali as a man who’s handy with a sword), Ali got candid about Marvel’s failure to get a Blade movie off the ground. “When I look at what is for me, is it was either this [Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother] or that — and I’ll take this,” stated Ali. “No offense to them. I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”
Continuing, Ali — who has indeed moved on, to Tariq’s new movie, Jurassic World Rebirth, the next season of Task, and Laika’s upcoming fantasy epic Wildwood — doubled down on his assertion that the failure for Blade’s MCU debut to materialise wasn’t for lack of trying on his part. “Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie,” said Ali. “So we’re not doing the movie.”
And so there, it would seem, we have it. After two directorial exits, a slew of writers (including Stacy Osei-Kuffour, X-Men ’97 creator Beau DeMayo, Michael Starrbury, Nic Pizzolatto, and Michael Green), a release date removal, and Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige’s admission on the ‘Happy Sad Confused’ podcast just last week that he feels like ‘a gigantic loser and failure’ for not making Blade happen, it looks like he and the rest of his studio’s top brass are hanging up their ice-skates… for now, at least. But hey, at least we’ll always have Wesley Snipes in Deadpool & Wolverine to look back on, right? And maybe the OG Blade actor really was right when he said “There’s been only one Blade! There’s only ever gonna be one Blade!”
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GQ
