Mahershala Ali paid for Marvel’s biggest failure with years of his own career — Blade never even started shooting
Ali trained with swords until he injured a knee and moved his family to Atlanta. Kevin Feige has called Blade his biggest professional failure.
Right, so Mahershala Ali has come out and properly aired his frustrations about the absolute saga that has been Marvel's never-ending Blade reboot. If you thought that film had only wasted your time waiting through its constant delays, think again — it properly derailed Ali’s own career for years, and he’s not shy in spelling out just how much Marvel’s stop-start antics have cost him.
Blade was announced all the way back in 2019 and still hasn't started filming.
The Waiting Game
Ali first linked up with Marvel over the project in 2019, got the public announcement that summer at San Diego Comic-Con, and then… nothing. The man did all his prep — training night and day with swords, picking up martial arts, to the point where he properly injured his knee. Not only that, he actually picked up his entire family and shifted to Atlanta, all because Marvel insisted filming would kick off any day. Of course, the only thing that kept starting was another round of delays — and then the industry itself went on strike for good measure.
The Cost of Commitment
Here’s where it gets really galling. Ali wasn’t just waiting around, binging Netflix. His contract basically chained him to the Blade schedule for years, which meant every time an actually interesting script landed in his inbox, he had to knock it back, just in case Marvel finally decided to pull the trigger. Ali put it to GQ in pretty blunt terms on their One More Question podcast:
‘I’m saying no to things in that time because they own my schedule basically’
Which, honestly, is rough for a bloke who’s picked up two Oscars. The interviewer pointed out that since Green Book, Ali managed only five films in eight years. His take? ‘That should have been six or seven. Blade didn’t happen.’ And Marvel boss Kevin Feige himself has called the whole mess his ‘biggest professional failure’ — something Ali made clear he agrees with.
Turning the Page
It wasn’t just about not donning Blade’s trenchcoat, either. This drawn-out maybe/maybe-not properly skewed Ali’s whole creative trajectory. He told GQ that finally getting a definitive off-switch on Blade was a relief, saying it let him properly move on and return to being, in his words, ‘hungry’ for something new. Instead of wasted sword lessons, he’s already channelled that training into a different project: Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, directed by Bassam Tariq — who, by the way, was once attached to Blade himself, before the revolving doors spun again.