How do you f**k up something as sure fire as a movie about Blade? It’s been seven years since Blade was announced at the San Diego Comic Con. It had everything lined up for success. Acclaimed short film and documentary maker Bassam Tariq would be directing. Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali would star as the titular dhampir. Add in the fact that the original two Blade films from 1998 and 2002 were well liked and still popular. Then take Marvel at its highpoint with Avengers: Endgame debuting a few months before. It could only spell good things. It yielded absolutely nothing.
Ali is Out, So What Went Wrong?
Last week it was confirmed that Ali is done with whatever was happening with Blade. In his own words, “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it.” While that might be a bit reductive, it also largely holds true. There were some factors that got in the way. The biggest one was COVID-19. That ground film production to a halt and caused massive production issues across the industry. After all, this is a disease that killed over seven million people across the globe; that’s going to have an impact on business.
There’s also the departure of Tariq as director. He left the project only a couple months before production was to begin. Then there were reported issues with getting the right script. It sounds like a mess that would cause most films to fall apart. It should be noted though, aside from the pandemic, similar issues happened with Ant-Man. Edgar Wright was attached to write and direct only to have a falling out over creative differences. He was replaced with Peyton Reed and the film still moved forward. So, Ali isn’t entirely wrong. If they wanted to do Blade, they could have found a way to do Blade.
Backing the Wrong Horses
What happened then? With the recent cancellation of Wonder Man and its second season getting scrapped, some have speculated that Marvel has a problem with its Black superheroes. That’s doubtful. Black Panther proved that there’s a market for Black superheroes that transcends race and culture. The 2018 film made $1.35 billion. That’s massive. What’s more, it made about $700 million of that domestically, showing that Black characters and storytelling (Ryan Coogler wrote and directed the film) can be marketed without an issue.
No, this isn’t a problem with race or diversity in this case. After all, other Marvel movies came out after COVID that had a lot of diversity. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Marvels, Eternals, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Captain America: Brave New World. But the only one of those movies that really did numbers at the box office was Wakanda Forever. Even that fell short of the original but that probably had more to do with losing Chadwick Boseman. That’s still devastating. So again, the problem was not with race, the problem is more how Marvel just completely lost sight of everything after Endgame.
Endgame
Kevin Feige and the team at Disney/Marvel tricked themselves in an accidental way during the Infinity Saga of films. Thanks to the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, they pretty much believed that they could throw anything on the screen and people would watch it. They weren’t wrong. Those pre-Avengers: Infinity War titles were huge. But they were all a part of something bigger with Thanos at the end. You had to see those films because they were all leading up to something. After Endgame that all fell away. So now you couldn’t just throw any C-list or D-list hero up on the big screen and expect people to turn out for it. But Blade should have been exempt from that.
Letting a Good Thing Slip Away
Unlike the characters in Thunderbolts* or The Eternals, people actually cared about Blade. Thanks to Wesley Snipes playing him in the original films, he had a reputation. Marvel easily could’ve built on that, but instead they spent time trying to play up superheroes that the general populace didn’t care about. It feels like they took Blade for granted in that regard. Maybe it was the kind of movie that they figured they could always get around to because there was some resonance there. So instead, let’s get these other franchises off the ground on film and television.
Then the execs at Disney, complete with Bob Iger‘s return, started seeing a glut of content. Suddenly there was too much superhero content and things had to be cut back. We theorize that’s what was the ultimate death knell for Blade. There was so much energy, effort, and money being poured into building up a bunch of heroes with little to no return. Nobody’s talking about Moon Knight or Echo or The Marvels, so the plug got pulled and “quality over quantity” became the approach. That probably didn’t leave much room to develop Blade as a priority film with the major release schedule being scaled down.
New Line Cinema
Blade Deserved Better
That seems to us to be the most plausible theory about what happened. Maybe more details will come out other than Kevin Feige basically just saying he screwed up. He did, and at least he admits it. Still, this debacle is something that never should’ve happened. This is one of Marvel’s biggest f** ups, if not its biggest since the start of the MCU. We really hope one day we’ll get another Blade movie. Even if it’s a complete, standalone picture, we deserve one. Maybe even bring back Wesley Snipes if he’s still game.
