Actor Mahershala Ali was all set to appear in a remake of Marvel’s Blade series, but ultimately the studio took a pass and now the proposed star is ripping the Disney-owned superhero franchise for failing to bring the film to fruition.
Ali’s criticism comes as Disney faces a racism scandal over how it prioritizes its minority leads.
The actor was announced as the star of a revamped Blade way back in 2019, but it is seven years later, the film never got off the drawing board, and has now been officially canceled as the comic book movie giant retrenches in the face of a string of box office misses and outright bombs.
“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,” Ali said during a press junket for his newest film, according to Variety. “For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”
“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,” he said of the doomed Blade project.
Fans were up for a Blade remake — even as the Wesley Snipes-starring original trilogy is still popular. But Marvel went through numerous stalls, two directors, and in the end just dumped the whole deal.
Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige recently said on a podcast that he feels like a “gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires,” Feige added. “It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on Blade, and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Regardless, Ali said that he is glad Blade never came off because if it had, he would not have been able to make his current action film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which is also directed by Bassam Tariq.
“When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me,” Ali said. “And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for ‘Blade.’ In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level, just in my own journey between me, myself, and I.”
Despite the collapse of Blade, Feige is still announcing new projects. At this year’s San Diego Comic Con, Feige claimed that Marvel is set to produce a new Ghost Rider, starring Ryan Giosling, andBlack Panther 3, starring David Jonsson in the top role.
But some are pointing to the end of Blade as just another example of a black lead being cancelled at Disney’s Marvel studios.
The news of Blade’s demise came at the same time as Marvel’s surprise announcement that the second season for Wonder Man, starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, has been cancelled. Others noted that further entries of Captain America starring Anthony Mackie have also been dumped. And it isn’t just the black characters. A followup to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has fallen by the wayside, ending a path forward for Marvel’s top Asian hero, a new Ghost Rider starring a Hispanic star was quietly shelved, and nothing is happening to keep Moon Knight on the front burner, putting an end to its first big Middle Eastern-themed character
The pop culture website Giant Freakin Robot told its readers that the piling up of cancellations has fans crying “racism.”
“Why do some fans think Marvel Studios is racist? It mostly comes down to the fact that they keep canceling or indefinitely delaying projects that feature actors of color…. Marvel repeatedly screwing up high-profile projects involving actors of color has led to some persistent accusations of racism within the fandom,” the site wrote.
The site Complex also pointed out that the comic book movie makers are facing accusations of racism.
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