At this point, every update about Blade gets progressively worse.
The failed Marvel movie has been in the news recently for all of the wrong reasons. Creatives attached to the Blade reboot are now speaking about their original ideas before Marvel paused the film indefinitely.
Grammy Award winner Flying Lotus, who recently wrote and directed Ash, revealed his plans to write music for the MCU’s Blade, with Mahershala Ali in the titular role.
“I guess we are so far from it even being a possibility now but. Yeah I was signed on to write music for the new Blade movie before it fell thru,” Flying Lotus wrote on X. “Maybe it’ll come around again but I doubt it. Would have been fun tho.”
On the Designing Hollywood podcast, Academy Award-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter stopped by to promote Sinners. Like Sinners, Blade was being crafted as a vampire period piece set in the 1920s. With a pause on Blade, Carter applied those similar ideas from the Blade reboot to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.
“I was prepping Blade for Marvel, and it was a 1920s Blade story, and it got shut down because of the writers’ strike and the actors’ strike, so I was just in limbo,” Carter said on the podcast. “Having done a lot of research for this period piece about a vampire — Blade is a vampire story — [Coogler]’s wife, Zinzi, who also was a producer on [Sinners], she gave me a call and said, ‘I’m not gonna tell you the story, but Ryan has a story he’s going to tell you about … It is a period piece about vampires.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, I have already been living in that space for quite a long time prepping Blade, and Blade‘s not going to happen, so let me hear it.’”
Speaking of Sinners, Delroy Lindo, who starred in Coogler’s movie, was attached to the Blade reboot. Lindo revealed to EW that he would have played a Marcus Garvey-esque character, the leader of a community. Lindo was looking forward to playing the character until Blade “went off the rails.”
“When Marvel came to me, they seemed to be really interested in my input,” Lindo told EW. “And in the various conversations I had with producers, the writer, the director at the time, it was all leading into being very inclusive. It was really exciting conceptually, but it was also exciting in terms of the character that was going to form. And then, for whatever reason, it just went off the rails.”
Ali’s involvement in Blade dates back to 2019 when he appeared during Marvel’s presentation at the San Diego Comic-Con. However, Blade suffered numerous setbacks and ran through several directors, including Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange. In October 2024, Kevin Feige removed Blade from its November 2025 release date.
