Marvel first announced Blade in 2019, starring Mahershala Ali. However, the film has not yet entered the production phase.
Kevin Feige, head of the franchise, explained the delay in a recent interaction with a journalist, “We had spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga. That’s never going to happen to us. We always had more characters that people were asking about than we could possibly make, because we weren’t going to make a movie a month — that’s crazy.”
Then, the studio’s chief pointed to an earlier strategy where the franchise is producing more content as Disney+ was launched. “Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more, and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ … But maybe that’s what we fell into,” he added.
Kevin continued, “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time.”
He added, “We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade,’ and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Moreover, the Blade was scheduled to begin filming in 2022, but it underwent several creative changes as multiple directors exited the project, with no filmmaker currently attached to the project.
