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Mahershala Ali is dumbfounded like the rest of us when it comes to Marvel’s inability to get his “Blade” movie reboot off the ground. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast over the summer
that he was “feeling like a gigantic loser and failure” for bungling Ali’s “Blade,” and now the actor told GQ that he agrees with that assessment.
“That’s a Kevin Feige question,” Ali said when asked why Marvel never got to the point of putting “Blade” into production. “They had, as you said, a two-time Oscar-winning actor under contract and you got billions of dollars. That’s a question for them. I don’t mean anything personal to you, but I don’t know why it didn’t. To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that it was—Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree.”
Marvel originally announced “Blade” in July 2019. Bassam Tariq (who now directs Ali in “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother”) was the first director to join the movie, but he exited in September 2022 roughly two months before it was set to begin shooting. Variety reported in November 2023 that “Blade” had gone through at least five writers, from “Watchmen” scribe Stacy Osei-Kuffour to Michael Starrbury. Yann Demange stepped in as the movie’s director after Tariq’s exit, but Demange ended up dropping out in June 2024.
Amid the film’s development struggles, Ali’s interest in playing Blade has never wavered. He told Varietyon the “Jurassic World Rebirth” red carpet last summer: “I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready.” In an interview with GQ earlier this year, Ali called out Marvel point blank by saying: “You had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”
Speaking to press in July 2025, Feige explained how the prolonged delays on “Blade” were a symptom of Marvel’s “over-expansion” into Disney+ streaming content where “for the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality.” When Marvel began to reevaluate its development process, the “Blade” movie was one of the projects that stalled.
“Blade” was the latest example of Ali’s career never being sure-footed despite being a two-time Oscar-winning actor for “Moonlight” and “Green Book.” The actor told GQ in his latest interview that he thought his career would break through after the Oscar wins, yet he still found himself fighting to be cast in HBO’s “True Detective” Season 3 as opposed to getting any offers.
“I don’t feel any bitterness or disappointment around that. I want to be careful of it coming off that way because it’s honestly not how I feel,” Ali explained. “If anything, there’s sort of a relief in the epiphany of like, ‘Oh, ain’t nobody coming to save you. You got to build your boat. They’re not coming. There’s no helicopter coming. Get to cutting wood.'”
Ali also said in the interiew, “I don’t know why I constantly feel like I have to remind people of stuff or prove myself to people, but that’s just how this business works. And it exhausts me. And so then you start thinking about: How long do I have to do this this way, or do it at all?”
Watch Ali’s full interview with GQ in the video below.
