Mahershala Ali Calls Out Marvel for Not Making ‘Blade’: ‘You Had Me Under Contract. They Have Billions of Dollars. If They Wanted to Do It, We Would’ve Done It’

As most Marvel fans know by now, Mahershala Ali was announced to star in a “Blade” movie during a flashy, surprise Comic-Con appearance in 2019, but the movie didn’t get made. The two-time Oscar winner never appeared in live-action as the popular vampire-hunting anti-hero, despite Marvel Studios hiring director Bassam Tariq, and later Yann Demange, to helm the film. Now after production stalled out, Ali and Tariq have teamed up in the wake of the failed Marvel movie to make this fall’s Amazon MGM action film, “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.” If the actor and director hadn’t been brought together for “Blade,” their new movie wouldn’t have been made. “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 told GQ. “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.” Popular on Variety Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, who announced Ali’s casting as Blade at Comic-Con seven years ago, recently spoke openly about his personal disappointment at the movie not getting made. “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala,” Feige said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast last week. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. 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.” Ultimately, Ali is happy that he’s starring in “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” instead of “Blade.” “When I look at what is for me, is it was either this or that — and I’ll take this. No offense to them. 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. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on,” he said. “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.” Last week at San Diego Comic-Con, Feige announced a “Ghost Rider” movie starring Ryan Gosling and “Black Panther 3,” starring David Jonsson as the new hero.