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Bad news for those eagerly anticipating Mahershala Ali stepping into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as vampiric vampire hunter Blade: Disney and Marvel have taken the project entirely off the release schedule, suggesting that… well, the movie might be altogether dead. And not the kind of dead that vampires normally find themselves familiar with, either.

The movie was officially removed from the schedule October 22, more than five years after originally being announced by Kevin Feige at San Diego Comic-Con 2019. Notably, the Blade announcement was one of the few undated projects announced during that presentation, with the only details given out onstage being the announcement of the movie and the fact that Ali — at the time, a big deal thanks to his Academy Award win for Green Book that same year — was attached to the project.

Blade in motion

To describe the production as troubled would be an understatement; Marvel hired a creative team of writer Stacy Osei-Kuffour (who worked on HBO’s Watchmen) and director Bassam Tariq in 2021 with an eye towards a 2023 release. A year later, Tariq departed the project just weeks before production was planned to begin, with Marvel retooling the screenplay with X-Men ’97 showrunner Beau DeMayo handling rewrites. That was in September 2022, but two months later, the rewritten screenplay was dumped altogether when Michael Starrbury was hired to write an entirely new script for newly hired director Yann Demange. By this point, the release date had slipped to September 2024.

Things continued to remain in flux, with first True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, and then Michael Green hired to rewrite Starrbury’s screenplay in April and November 2023, respectively, while the movie’s release got pushed to 2025, in response to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of last year. Then, just months ago, it emerged that Marvel had lost a second director for the project when Demange stepped away, and that Marvel was also bringing in another writer, Eric Pearson, to retouch the screenplay once again.

Throughout all of this, the movie officially held onto its November 2025 release date… until this week, when it was unceremoniously removed from Disney’s theatrical calendar, with the slot taken by the new Predator: Badlands, a follow-up to 2021’s Prey. So… where now?

Remember the Inhumans

Blade isn’t the first time Marvel has removed a movie from its release calendar wholesale; the same thing happened to Inhumans, which was originally announced as a theatrical project in 2014 for a 2018 release. That date got bumped out a year when it was announced that Marvel and Sony would collaborate on Spider-Man: Homecoming — Homecoming took the Inhumans’ spot on the calendar — and in 2016, the movie was removed from the calendar entirely, never to return.

(Well, almost never; Inhumans eventually became an ABC miniseries, the first episode of which was shown in IMAX theaters in 2017. It proved to be a box office flop.)

What can we learn from the experience of Inhumans? Well, given that it’s the only other movie Marvel has entirely removed from its release calendar instead of rescheduling, it’s not the strongest sign that Marvel will ever actually get around to making Blade happen anytime soon — especially given that Marvel has already revised its goals recently moving from Avengers: The Kang Dynasty to Avengers: Doomsday, and realigning the MCU towards the introduction of Robert Downey Jr’s Doctor Doom. There’s a new focus for Marvel Studios across the next few years, and who’s to say if a perpetually troubled production even fits into the new road map anymore?

Blade in limbo

With the very real possibility that the Blade movie might never be made in play now, fans might wonder if they’ll ever get to see Mahershala Ali as the Daywalker on the big screen… especially given that actual Marvel Studios movies are joking about the idea that they won’t. It’s worth remembering that Ali’s Blade has already appeared in the MCU, albeit in voice only — he’s heard in a post-credit sequence in 2021’s Eternals, addressing the Black Knight. That establishes his presence in the MCU, and leaves the door wide open for a future appearance however long it may take… after all, let’s not forget that next year’s Captain America: Brave New World picks up characters last seen in 2008’s Incredible Hulk, demonstrating the impressively long memory Marvel has when needed.

(For that matter, who would have believed that Netflix's Daredevil would get a high-profile reboot on Disney+ featuring the original cast? Marvel really does like to zig when others are expecting it to zag, after all.)

Does that mean we’ll have to wait until 2041 before we get the Blade movie we’ve all been waiting for? Let’s hope not — especially when you consider that Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars would provide a couple of great launching pads to get the character into audiences’ minds for whatever came next. For now, though…? Let’s consider Blade as dead as a movie can be… at least until the next attempt to reboot it, of course.

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Keep up to date on Popverse's Marvel coverage, with these highlights:

• Marvel Studios has accidentally created a new Phase that predates Phases 1 - 6: the MCU Phase Zero
• Which Secret Wars comic the Russos are basing Avengers 6 off of
• Overgrown children of the atom: Marvel's X-Men can't evolve past their '90s commercial peak
• The biggest outstanding questions of the Marvel Studios' movies & TV shows
• Marvel's accidental closure on the Kang storyline
• Robert Downey Jr. is entering his villain era
• Donald Trump is the landlord for Marvel's House of Ideas
• For Marvel actors, the MCU also stands for the Marvel Commercials Universe
• The Fantastic 4: First Steps offers Marvel a visual makeover, courtesy of a classic movie designer
• Marvel Studios swapping out Doctor Doom for Kang offers the chance to jettison the Multiverse Saga
• What Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige is saying (and not saying) about the MCU X-Men franchise says a lot about the future of the Mutant Saga