Kevin Feige Somehow Couldn’t Get ‘Blade’ Off the Ground, and Now He Feels Like a ‘Gigantic Loser’
We’ll never understand why Marvel couldn’t get ‘Blade’ off the ground. Apparently, neither does Kevin Feige.
Look, I can’t believe that a Blade reboot with Mahershala Ali in the title role couldn’t get off the ground, either. In fact, it drives me nuts. So, I don’t think this is going to make anyone feel any better about the situation, but at least Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige is acknowledging the failure.
Variety reports that, while speaking on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast, Feige admitted: “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
I’m not out here to accuse Feige or anyone else of being a “gigantic loser”. What I will say is…this shouldn’t have been so hard.
Marvel originally announced Blade with Ali back in 2019. I don’t know many fans who weren’t excited about it. Ali had already proven himself to be a star with films like Predators, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, and Moonlight under his belt. He was coming off roles in Green Book and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse at the time. There wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that he’d make a great Blade.
And then came the issues.
Multiple directors attached and then not. Several versions of the script. Removal of the film from Marvel’s 2024 release calendar. So on and so forth.
Said Feige back in 2025, “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.”
Here’s the thing, though: a guy in a leather outfit killing vampires is Blade. Now, I’m not saying you don’t want to have a good story to go along with it. But, considering the comics to pull from and a glimpse at what made the 1998 Wesley Snipes film so successful…it has never felt like a film that should’ve been so difficult for Marvel to sink its fangs into.
