Marvel's dead Blade was a 1920s period piece, and its costumes turned up in Sinners instead
Marvel Studios’ Blade reboot could’ve been very different, with its director confirming a much‑rumoured plot shift before leaving in 2022, when pre‑production was already underway in Atlanta.
Let's talk about the great Blade reboot that never was—or, depending on your level of optimism, might still materialise out of Marvel Studios' existential fog. For a while there, it looked like we were actually getting Mahershala Ali taking on the fanged mantle, with a real director and everything. Then the whole affair slowly started to unravel, and the more you see behind the curtain, the wilder it gets.
A Different Kind of Blade
There's been a lot of rumour-mongering about how strange and ambitious some early scripts were for this MCU Blade project, but now we have something quite solid to chew on straight from one of the main creative voices. Bassam Tariq, who spent about a year and a half attached as director, just revealed he was trying to take Blade somewhere very specific: the 1920s. Yep, not New York in the now, but a proper period piece.
Bassam Tariq told TheWrap that his version of Blade was "a period piece," confirming the time-jumping rumours had some teeth all along.
So, he'd moved his whole family to Atlanta, pre-production was in full swing, and Ruth E. Carter—that’s Black Panther’s Oscar-winning costume boss—was on board designing threads tailored not for modern vampires, but a bygone era. Some of her unused work even found a second life in Ryan Coogler's Sinners.
From Hot Property to Lost Cause
Marvel first pulled the curtain back on its bold new Blade in 2019, with Mahershala Ali—multiple Oscar-winner and actual adult—set as the half-vampire daywalker, originally created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. (And yes, Wesley Snipes played him in the late '90s/early 2000s films, before showing up for a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine for old time’s sake.)
Ali told GQ: "If they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie … But I feel ready to move on from the Blade questions. Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question."
The buzz only grew after Ali’s (admittedly, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it) vocal tease in the Eternals post-credits—just his voice, but it was enough to send fans over the edge. Yet, behind the scenes, things were anything but simple. Tariq exited as director back in 2022; Yann Demange stepped in but the project kept hitting delay after delay, script changes galore, and eventually, forward momentum stalled entirely.
- 2019: Marvel officially announces the Blade reboot with Mahershala Ali cast.
- Tariq joins as director, pushes for a 1920s setting.
- Pre-production moves to Atlanta with Ruth E. Carter on costumes.
- Tariq exits in 2022, family in tow.
- Yann Demange comes aboard, delays mount up.
- The film quietly stops progressing after years of nothing but creative churn.
Marvel boss Kevin Feige even admitted in an interview with Josh Horowitz that the whole affair made him feel like a "gigantic loser and a failure", which, coming from the man who launched the world's biggest film franchise, is no small statement.
Ali’s Blade was first announced back in 2019, but despite years of development, Marvel never managed to get the finished film off the ground.