It seems the final stake has been driven into Marvel’s “Blade” movie, as Mahershala Ali says he’s officially “moved on” from the project.
In a new interview with GQ released on Friday morning, Ali got honest about the state of things with “Blade,” which remains unmade seven years after he was announced to be playing the character at San Diego Comic-Con. The film has seen several setbacks and multiple scripts but, when asked directly if “Blade” is any closer to becoming a reality, Ali said, “Not with me.”
“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me,” he said. “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”
Marvel did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.
The actor noted that his new film “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” — which sees him team up with Bassam Tariq, who was originally hired to direct “Blade” and one of the first to exit the project — is “in alignment with the type of work” he wants to be known for, which is not remakes.
“I’d love to do original work that resonates with people and impacts them in unique ways. So, I’m good,” he continued. “Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”
The actor asserted that he couldn’t have done both “Blade” and “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” and that he was happy to be able to use the skills he picked up training for the Marvel project on this one instead.
“But I feel ready to move on from the ‘Blade’ questions. Those questions are for [Marvel],” Ali said. “They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.”
The update comes just over a week after Marvel head Kevin Feige admitted in an interview that he’s “feeling like a gigantic loser and failure” for not being able to get the “Blade” remake off the ground with Ali.
Last year, Feige told TheWrap alongside a group of reporters that the studio “didn’t feel confident” in the script for “Blade,” highlighting that there had been four versions made, but that Ali was still attached.
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique and it fell right into the time when we started pulling back and saying ‘only accept insanely great’ and it wasn’t insanely great at the time,” Feige said. He also admitted that it became a casualty of a push for quantity over quality.
“We had spent 12 years working on the ‘Infinity Saga’ saying that’s never going to happen to us,” Feige said at the time. “And we always had more characters that people were asking about than we could possibly make because we weren’t going to make a movie a month, that’s crazy.”
“Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ and it led to the to the expansion and ‘Blade’ came up with that as well.”
