Mahershala Ali Agrees That Kevin Feige Failed Big Time With ‘Blade’
We’re still wrapping our heads around why a new ‘Blade’ didn’t happen, and now Mahershala Ali agrees Kevin Feige messed up big time.
Back in July, we reported that Marvel boss Kevin Feige felt “like a gigantic loser” after being unable to get the Blade reboot off the ground. And, listen, I don’t mean to be a jerk, but he was right to feel that way. How Marvel didn’t manage to make “cool half-vampire guy killing vampires” work is beyond me. Especially with Mahershala Ali (pictured above in Leave the World Behind) attached to star as the titular bloodsucker hunter.
Turns out, Ali feels the same.
Variety reports that the actor recently spoke with GQ, where he was asked about why Blade never happened. Said Ali, “That’s a Kevin Feige question. They had, as you said, a two-time Oscar-winning actor under contract and you got billions of dollars. That’s a question for them. I don’t mean anything personal to you, but I don’t know why it didn’t. To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that it was—Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree.”
Ouch. But when you’re right, you’re right.
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 , and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
