Daniel Kreps
Contact Daniel Kreps on X Contact Daniel Kreps by Email View all posts by Daniel Kreps July 31, 2026
President of Marvel studios Kevin Feige welcomes Mahershala Ali on stage during the Marvel panel in Hall H of the Convention Center during Comic Con in San Diego, California on July 20, 2019 Chris Delmas / AFP via Getty Images Amid the celebration over Ryan Gosling’s Ghost Rider casting and a new Black Panther, one announcement that didn’t come out of Marvel’s Comic-Con panel was an update on the long-delayed Blade movie with Mahershala Ali. That’s because, according to the actor in a new interview, he’s “moved on” from the reboot about the vampire-slaying antihero.
Marvel first announced plans to bring Blade into the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the 2019 Comic-Con, with Ali cast to fill the leather jacket previously worn by Wesley Snipes in a trio of pre-MCU films. Ali’s Blade even made an off-screen end-credits cameo in 2021’s Eternals, but it’s been all false starts, a carousel of directors, and script rewrites since then.
Seven years later, with Marvel no closer to bringing Blade back to the big screen and the character itself no longer in their Doomsday plans — and with Snipes himself reprising the role in Deadpool & Wolverine — Ali voiced his frustration with the whole process in a new interview with GQ that closes his door on Blade.
“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me,” Ali said. “If [Marvel] wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”
