The Mahershala Ali-starring Blade reboot is one of the MCU’s biggest what-ifs, and Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has seemingly confirmed the film is dead while expressing regret that he wasn’t able to make it work.
Appearing on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Feige was blunt in his comments, saying, “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.” Watch the clip below.
As Variety points out, Feige told the press in July 2025 that the numerous delays on Blade were a casualty of Marvel reevaluating its creative process following “over expansion” into Disney+ streaming content.
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” he said at the time. “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.”
Feige continued, “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.”
In fact, the Blade reboot took so long that it was eclipsed by Wesley Snipes’s reprisal of his role as Blade in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
In July 2019, Marvel Studios announced Mahershala Ali would be starring in a Blade movie at San Diego Comic-Con. From there, the film saw multiple delays, beginning with Bassam Tariq dropping out as director in September 2022. Production was then paused in October 2022 as the movie was pushed back to a September 2024 release date.
After Lovecraft Country director Yann Demange boarded the project in November 2022 alongside screenwriter Michael Starrbury, pre-production shut down during the writers’ strike in May 2023, and the release date was pushed back twice: first to February 2025 and then November 2025.
Perhaps the final sign that this version of Blade was finished was when Demange exited the project in June 2024.
