Remember when the Blade movie was announced? When we learned about it at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2019, there was a palpable excitement around Mahershala Ali playing the vampire hunter. But it’s been over seven years since then, and Blade is no longer expected among upcoming Marvel movies. As if I wasn’t bummed already, the movie’s former director shared some more details about it.
Blade Director Spills Details About Scrapped Movie
In 2021, Bassam Tariq was tapped to direct the MCU’s own Blade movie. And, in a new interview with The Wrap he spoke about the scrapped movie. The filmmaker said he spent a year and a half getting ready for production on the film. He moved his family to Atlanta, where he initially planned to shoot it, and pre-production was “well underway.”
The part of his new comments that really feel like a stab with a sword is this. The movie was going to take place in the 1920s for part of it, and its costume designer was Ruth Carter. Now, Carter is an Oscar-winning costume designer who did both Black Panther movies along with Malcolm X and Sinners. And according to Tariq, she even used some of the unused costumes she had made for Blade on Sinners.
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That’s without mentioning the fact that Sinners’ Delroy Lindo was also cast in late 2021 alongside Pearl’s Mia Goth and Lanterns’ lead Aaron Pierre. We also know that Andor’s DP Damián García had been hired and a major train set had been built, per The Hollywood Reporter. I have such FOMO about a movie so many fans like myself have been anticipating for years, and now it may never come.
But what it did do is make fast friends out of Ali and Tariq, who said at no point did they ever discuss working on subsequent projects while in Blade mode. He also shared:
The system was cool, and we were a part of it, but you knew that there was somebody else that’s running this thing. You’re there on their time. It’s a different thing. But I think we connected even at that point definitely on spirituality and our modalities of what this work is like, what this work means to us.
Call it disaster-laden kismet, but at least something good came out of the rubble of that unproduced project.
Why Isn’t Mahershala Ali’s Blade No Longer Happening?
From 2021 to 2025, Blade’s script was passed along by a ton of writers and hired two more directors to take the helm after Bassam Tariq left the project in 2023. In July, Mahershala confirmed he wouldn’t be Blade anymore saying: “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it.” It’s a disappointment because Mahershala Ali was perfect casting for the vampire hunter, and even pitched himself for the role himself! Marvel boss Kevin Feige even said he feels like “gigantic loser and failure” for never successfully getting it off the ground.
There is a bright side, though. Due to Bassim Tariq and Mahershala Ali connecting on Blade, they ended up making a movie together called Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. The action movie on the 2026 movie schedule follows Ali as a middle-class hitman who goes on a desperate quest to protect his three kids after the death of his wife. The movie allowed Ali to use his sword training skills he learned for Blade.
The Blade letdown I feel isn’t going away anytime soon, but I’ll be in line for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which has a wide theatrical release on October 5.