“Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” writer-director Bassam Tariq teamed with Mahershala Ali on the original action thriller after the pair’s effort to launch a “Blade” reboot for the Marvel Cinematic Universe fell apart. While the troubled project never came to fruition, Tariq still defended Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige.
“I want to be clear: I like Kevin,” Tariq told Vulture in an interview published Friday. “He’s a good dude. I really dislike all this s–t about like, ‘Marvel fumbled this. F–k Kevin Feige.’ No, man. He’s got a lot on his plate, too much. And I think we also had this impossible task of trying to compete with the first superhero movie, which is Wesley Snipes’s iconic ‘Blade.’ It’s really such a massive undertaking in a way that affected so many people.”
Ali was announced as the lead of a “Blade” reboot at Marvel Studios’ Comic-Con panel in 2019, taking on the role of the vampire-slaying superhero that Wesley Snipes first played through a trilogy of features from 1998 to 2004.
But the film never emerged from development, with Tariq joining in 2021 before departing in 2022. The unproduced feature went through another director, Yann Demange; set and delayed several release dates; and attached names like Delroy Lindo, Aaron Pierre and Mia Goth. But the project has been all but nixed at Marvel Studios. Snipes even returned to play Blade before Ali ever got to play the role on screen, with the former franchise star making a cameo in 2024’s “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Ali has been forward with his criticism of the failed “Blade” reboot, telling GQ that Feige “should feel that way” when asked about the Marvel head calling the unproduced project the “biggest failure of his career.”
Tariq ended up working with Ali on his hitman feature “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” now playing in theaters. When asked whether he knows if Feige has seen the feature, Tariq told Vulture, “I don’t know. I hope he does … I’d love to talk to him if he sees it.”
