Mahershala Ali has spoken out about his Marvel Blade movie that never happened.
The actor was announced as Blade way back in 2019, but the movie never managed to make it into production, and it has now been scrapped entirely.
“Should have been six or seven,” Ali said on GQ’s One More Question podcast, when the interviewer listed the films he’d made since Green Book. “Blade didn’t happen, which I felt like definitely impacted how things unfold in your trajectory.”
When asked if he was saving time for Blade, Ali clarified: “I wasn’t saving. Once it was happening, I was working on it. I was doing what I needed to do to prepare myself. It just didn’t happen.”
As for why it didn’t happen, Ali candidly gave his thoughts. “That’s a Kevin Feige question,” he said. “They had, as you said, a two-time Oscar winning actor under contract, and you got billions of dollars. That’s a question for them, why it didn’t happen. I don’t mean anything personal to you, but I don’t know why it did. To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that Kevin said it was the biggest failure of his career, and I agree.”
When the interviewer quoted Feige saying he felt like “a gigantic loser and failure,” Ali replied: “I agree with him. 100%, 100%. He should feel that way.”
By the sounds of things, Ali worked very hard on the role, too. “I spent a year training. I trained so hard until I blew my knee out,” he shared. “I was waiting for them to – ‘Oh, pushing it back. Pushing it back.’ I’m still training. I’m training, I’m learning sword work. I’m learning, like, name a martial art, I’m training in it. I literally uprooted my family, moved to Atlanta. We’re there waiting to go, and they just keep pushing it back, pushing it back, pushing it, and it doesn’t happen. Then it’s a strike [the WGA writers’ strike], and then, you know.”
Ali also wasn’t a fan of announcing the film so early. “I went to them in 2019. That was my first meeting,” he said. “We’re at Comic-Con by 2019, in the summer. I didn’t want to make no announcements. I don’t believe in the announcements. Just do the work, and then it’s like, okay, you announce the work is done, right? But all this anticipatory stuff is not – I’m not a fan of that at all. But they want to do all that. We did all that, and had a story greenlit, and then we don’t have any deliverables. And I can’t deliver until they deliver, right?
“So, that’s not a secret. Otherwise, we’d have a movie,” he added. “And then I’m saying no to things in that time because they own my schedule, basically.”
Next up for Marvel is Avengers: Endgame Encore, and footage has already hit the internet of the bonus scenes linking to Avengers: Doomsday.
Endgame Encore arrives this September 25. While you wait, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and TV shows for everything else the MCU has in store.