When Wesley Snipes' iconic Daywalker quipped, "There's been only one Blade! There's only ever gonna be one Blade!" in Marvel's mutant mash-up Deadpool & Wolverine this summer, it was hard to know whether to laugh or wince. After all, Marvel Studios has been trying — and struggling — to get their own Blade movie off the ground ever since announcing Mahershala Ali would be the MCU's vampire hunter in Hall H at San Diego Comic Con way back in 2019. And now, following the departures of both director Bassam Tariq and his successor Yann Demange, it's starting to look like Snipes' zinger may well have heralded the final nail being driven into Blade's coffin.
Per Deadline's reporting, Marvel's Blade has lost its already pretty ambitious 7 November, 2025 release slot to Dan Trachtenberg's Predator: Badlands. And whilst this news doesn't come with any formal cancellation announcement for the movie, which was set to see Ali star opposite scream queen Mia Goth, the fact that Marvel Studios concurrently dated three untitled MCU features for 18 February, 2028, 5 May, 2028, and 10 November, 2028 would at least suggest that there are no imminent plans to pick things back up on the bloodsucker front anytime soon.
Hampered by the impact of COVID and the subsequent one-two punch of the necessary but no doubt difficult to manoeuvre SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes last year, the odds seem to have been stacked against Kevin Feige and co's Blade movie ever since the character's arrival in the MCU was first teased at the end of Eternals back in 2021. And now, having lost its directors, a slew of writers (including Stacy Osei-Kuffour, X-Men '97 creator Beau DeMayo, Michael Starrbury, Nic Pizzolatto, and Michael Green), and even its release date, it's hard not to feel like perhaps the best thing for the project at this point is a clean break and a fresh start once the Multiverse Saga has played out. And hey, with Ali and Goth still technically attached to star, and Feige having already gone on record as saying he's more bothered about getting the MCU's Blade right than released, who knows? Maybe this one hasn't truly bitten the dust just yet — even if it will have taken one hell of an uphill ice-skate to come together.