Mahershala Ali didn’t seem to want to talk about the status of his long-delayed Marvel feature, “Blade.” During an interview with Vogue for “Jurassic World Rebirth,” co-star Jonathan Bailey asked Ali and Scarlett Johansson to list which Marvel films they had appeared.
Ali quickly piped up, “Leave me out of it,’ and Bailey responded, “Well there’s one that we’re very excited about.”
“That’s a Scarlett question,” Ali chuckled. The trio then quickly moved to attempting to name all of Johansson’s MCU features, after which Ali smoothly slid into the next, unrelated question, even as as Johansson asked, “What about you?”
Ali did make one, voice-only cameo appearance in 2021’s “Eternals” as Blade, and since then the character’s solo feature film has been in development hell. Ali was first announced to play the character at San Diego Comic Con in 2019. The project has since been through a frustrating series of fits and starts, which IndieWire previously recapped in exhaustive detail after the last major development: Disney pulling the film from its 2025 release schedule.
Not long before that move, Wesley Snipes — who played Blade in the trilogy that spanned from 1998-2004 — voiced his support for Ali bringing the hero back to life.
“It’s not the actor’s fault,” he told Entertainment Weekly in July 2024. “There’s a lot more that goes on with pulling this ‘Blade’ stuff off. You need a lot of secret sauce to do the ‘Blade’ thing, man. Good luck. You’re my man, though.”
“Sinners” actor Delroy Lindo told EW in April that he was cast in one iteration of the project, but that things eventually stalled.
“When Marvel came to me, they seemed to be really interested in my input,” Lindo said. “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.”
The project went far enough, it seems, that costumes were created for it, but when “Blade” didn’t happen, costume designer Ruth E. Carter repurposed the warehouse of period pieces she had set aside for “Sinners.”
“She happened to have a warehouse full of period-appropriate clothes, and it was like, ‘Yo, we got to shoot this movie like tomorrow.’ And Marvel was generous enough and kind enough to let us basically purchase it at price,” producer Sev Ohanian told ScreenCrush (via Variety).
Last month, at the “Jurassic World Rebirth” New York premiere, Ali Indicated to Variety that he was still interested in making the film.
“Call Marvel… I’m ready. Let them know I’m ready,” he said.