For anyone who has been following the five-year-long development of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Blade, it feels like we’re stuck in Groundhog Day. It’s 2024 and we’re still wondering how a studio could be hand delivered a concept as bulletproof as “Oscar winner Mahershala Ali as a vampire hunter” and somehow manage to fumble it. Believing that an Ali-led Blade movie is genuinely going to make it to theaters is like being Charlie Brown rushing toward Lucy’s football. The voice of Jessica Lange echoes in the back of our minds, insisting that there’s not going to be a Blade movie, you stupid slut. Anyway, Marvel took Blade off its schedule of upcoming releases on Tuesday.
Disney replaced Blade on November 7, 2025 with Predator: Badlands. According to Entertainment Weekly, Marvel also set three dates for some unnamed superhero movies: February 18, 2028, May 5, 2028, and November 10, 2028. Blade is no longer on the schedule at all. Even if Blade turns out to be one of those unnamed releases, that’ll put the premiere almost 10 years after the project was initially announced, which is nuts!
Of course, studio scheduling gets shuffled around all the time; we were actually more surprised when Blade‘s November release survived Disney’s last calendar purge back in August. Today’s news makes a lot more sense, given that the Blade movie keeps burning through writers, directors, and actors. Right now, Eric Pearson (Fantastic Four) is reportedly on the script, with no director attached. “For the last few years, as we’ve been trying to crack that movie, the most important thing for us is not rushing it, and making sure we are making the right Blade movie. Because there were some great Blade movies years ago,” Kevin Feige told BlackTreeTV over the summer (via EW). “We are committed to the movie and we’re so committed to it that we’re not going to make it until it’s right. [It] has been frustrating for us and for some fans that it’s taken a while but we have a writer working on it now.”
It’s definitely been frustrating for Ali, according to a Hollywood Reporter story earlier this year. An anonymous agent noted that talent signed to Blade “have missed about three windows to shoot other movies or shows.” Ali’s own attorney called the years of development hell without shooting a single scene “pretty much the craziest thing in my professional experience.” Meanwhile, the old Blade, a.k.a. Wesley Snipes, showed up in the biggest blockbuster hit of the year, Deadpool & Wolverine, which can’t feel great if you’re the new Blade who hasn’t even gotten his movie off the ground. When will Marvel finally put Ali, and the rest of us, out of our misery?
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