Mahershala Ali Breaks Silence on Scrapped ‘Blade’ Movie: “If They Wanted To Do The Movie, We Would Have Done It”

After years of speculation, Mahershala Ali has finally shared his thoughts on Marvel’s long-abandoned ‘Blade‘ reboot.

The Oscar-winning actor, who was unveiled as the iconic vampire hunter in 2019, never got the chance to suit up as the character due to multiple creative shake-ups.

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Instead, the setback paved the way for Ali to reunite with former ‘Blade’ director Bassam Tariq on the upcoming Amazon MGM action film ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.’ Reflecting on the twist of fate with GQ, the star revealed:

“When I look at this and ‘Blade,’ I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me.”

Ali also made it clear he holds no resentment, explaining that if Marvel had truly wanted the movie to happen, it would have. He shared:

“When I look at what is for me, is it was either this or that — and I’ll take this. No offense to them. 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. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on,” he said.  “Again, 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.”

His comments arrive shortly after Marvel Studios president Kevin Fiege admitted he was deeply disappointed the reboot never made it into production, saying on the ‘Happy Sad Confused‘ podcast that:

“I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala, we didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time.”

Meanwhile, Marvel has already shifted its attention to future projects, including ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Black Panther 3.’