Mahershala Ali has confirmed that the Blade film has been scrapped, with fans sharing their anger on social media.
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The double Oscar-winner was first announced to be playing the famous Marvel character back in 2019, though the project has faced numerous setbacks since.
Among them are several changes of director and writers, and Ali has now opened up about the cancellation, sharing how he decided to do new film Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother – which is helmed by Bassam Tariq, who was originally meant to direct Blade.
“When I look at what is for me, is it was either this [Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother] or that — and I’ll take this,” he told GQ (via Empire).
“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 added: “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.”
Fans shared their anger at the news, one writing on Bluesky: “Marvel this is not a good look for you. What are you guys doing?”
“How exactly does one fumble Blade so badly? How do you overcomplicate ‘half-vampire kills vampires with a sword and looks like a badass’?” another added, a third sharing: “Marvel cancelled Blade. Knock all this shit over and wrap it up – Fuck’em.”
Referencing the cancellation of Wonder Man, a fourth said on X: “Wonder man got an Emmy nom but it still gets cancelled and now he joins mcu limbo with Monica and Blade……great job Feige.”
Wonder man got an Emmy nom but it still gets cancelled and now he joins mcu limbo with Monica and Blade……great job Feige pic.twitter.com/QfXDAC30dX
— Mello 🆘 (@Mellosctrl) July 30, 2026
Marvel previously removed Blade from its planned November 2025 release in 2024, while Marvel boss Kevin Feige said last year that the MCU has suffered from “over-expansion”.
“For the very first time ever, quantity trumped quality,” he said. “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.
“We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on Blade, and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Last week, Feige admitted on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he felt like a “gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala”.
