Mahershala Ali confirms he’s leaving ‘Blade’ after seven years of waiting for Marvel: “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it”
Farewell to Mahershala Ali’s Blade: The actor confirms he no longer expects to play the character, and the future of Marvel’s vampire hunter is once again up in the air.
It was an open secret, but now it’s official. The new ‘Blade’ movie starring Mahershala Ali in the MCU won’t be moving forward. After nearly seven years of delays, director changes, script rewrites, and a production that never really got off the ground, the actor himself has confirmed that he’s moved on and no longer expects to step into the shoes of Marvel’s vampire hunter. This farewell comes with some particularly revealing comments about the troubled project, with the actor pointing directly to Marvel Studios’ lack of commitment to moving it forward.
Mahershala Ali’s ‘Blade’ won’t see the light of day after seven years stuck in Marvel limbo
The new ‘Blade’ was announced by Marvel Studios in 2019 as the vampire hunter’s big return to the big screen more than fifteen years after Wesley Snipes wrapped up his original trilogy with ‘Blade: Trinity’ (2004). In the meantime, the character had already starred in a TV series unknown to the general public, with Kirk Jones replacing Snipes as Eric Brooks, though it only lasted one season. The casting of Mahershala Ali, a two-time Oscar winner for ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Green Book,’ seemed destined to usher in a new era for the character within the MCU, but the project ended up being bogged down by several director changes, script rewrites, and all sorts of production problems that prevented it from ever getting off the ground.
Now, nearly seven years after that much-publicized announcement, Mahershala Ali has confirmed in an interview with GQ that he has moved on and no longer expects to star in ‘Blade.’ The actor admits he’s not happy with how this story has ended, especially because he likes to see the projects he’s involved in through to completion, but his strongest words come when he explains why, from his point of view, the movie never got off the ground: “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it.” With this statement, Ali seems to make it clear that, for his part, he was willing to see the project through, bringing an end to his tumultuous stint as Marvel’s new vampire hunter.
The most interesting thing is that Mahershala Ali technically did end up playing Blade within the MCU, even though we never actually got to see him in character. The actor made a very brief voice cameo in the post-credits scene of ‘Eternals’ (2021), in which Eric Brooks speaks off-screen to Dane Whitman—Kit Harington—just as he is about to wield the Ebony Blade. That sequence seemed to set the stage both for Whitman’s future transformation into the Black Knight and for Blade’s formal introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, becoming a promise that, at least in Ali’s case, seems unlikely to ever come to fruition.
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As a result, Blade’s future within the MCU is once again shrouded in uncertainty. In 2024, Wesley Snipes reprised the role in ‘Deadpool and Wolverine’, though all signs pointed to it being a tribute to his legacy rather than a return with prospects for the future. For its part, Marvel Studios could still bring the character back with a different actor and a completely reimagined project, but the version announced with great fanfare in 2019 seems to have definitively reached the end of the road. After nearly seven years of development and countless problems, Mahershala Ali’s Blade bids farewell to the MCU in practically the same way he arrived: without audiences ever getting to see his face.
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