It's pretty much six years to the day that Marvel Studios ended its Hall H panel at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con by announcing that Mahershala Ali would lead a new Blade movie.
Since then, the movie has been through multiple creative teams, lost actors, and even become the butt of memorable gag from returning Daywalker Wesley Snipes in Deadpool & Wolverine. So, what's been the main obstacle?
"The obstacle was Ryan Coogler called and said, 'We’d love some costumes for Sinners,'" Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige joked during a recent sit-down with the Hollywood trades, referring to recent reports that Sinners made use of Ruth E. Carter's costumes created for Blade. "And we said, 'Take them, man.' He’s our good friend, take our costumes. We’ll hold off on the movie."
Reiterating that Coogler remains hard at work on Black Panther 3 and isn't who the studio is looking to helm its troubled Blade project, Feige announced that The Fantastic Four: First Steps and Thunderbolts* writer Eric Pearson is now penning the latest draft.
"We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on [Ali] and have him start killing vampires," Feige said of why scripts by Michael Starrbury, Nic Pizzolatto, Michael Green, and more didn't get in front of cameras. "It had to be unique and it fell right into the time when we started pulling back and saying 'only accept insanely great' and it wasn’t insanely great at the time."
"And we didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can start and have a good script and make it a great script through production," he admitted. "We didn’t feel confident that we could that on ‘Blade’ and didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and do want to do that to us."
While original plans called for Blade to be a period piece, Feige also confirmed that the idea has been scrapped. That's probably for the best, seeing as the MCU movie would face being endlessly compared to Coogler's horror masterpiece, Sinners.
"There were three or four, two that were period two that are not," the executive shared. "We’ve landed on modern day and that’s what we’re focusing on."
This does sound promising, and while Feige didn't offer a timeline for when we'll see Blade in theaters, chances are it's going to be released during the MCU's next Saga. On the plus side, Ali remains attached, so there's every chance he'll still get the opportunity to take on what sounded like a dream role back in 2019 when he was first cast.
Assuming nothing has been changed, we'll also get to see (well, hear) the Oscar-winner play a Moon Knight/Blade hybrid in this year's Marvel Zombies series from Marvel Animation.
Keep checking back here for more on Blade as we have it.