Remember Marvel’s Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali? Not the one currently in development hell, but the version originally slated for release in November 2023 before getting scrapped after losing its director twice? Well, its former costume designer does. What’s more, she has confirmed the project that never came to fruition was originally going to be a period piece.
Speaking on the Designing Hollywood podcast, Ruth E. Carter, the two-time Academy Award-winning costume designer known for her work on films like Coming 2 America and director Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners as well as both Black Panthers, looked back on her experiences prepping for Blade. Fortunately, all of Carter’s time spent brainstorming costume designs for the canned Blade reboot wasn’t for nothing, because she ended up following a similar path for Sinners.
“I was prepping Blade for Marvel, and it was a 1920s Blade story, and it got shut down because of the writers’ strike and the actors’ strike, so I was just in limbo,” Carter said. “Having done a lot of research for this period piece about a vampire—Blade is a vampire story—[Coogler]’s wife, Zinzi, who also was a producer on [Sinners], she gave me a call and said, ‘I’m not gonna tell you the story, but Ryan has a story he’s going to tell you about … It is a period piece about vampires.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, I have already been living in that space for quite a long time prepping Blade, and Blade‘s not going to happen, so let me hear it.’”
According to a 2024 Hollywood Reporter article, Blade has involved different early iterations of the film’s script set in vastly different settings and periods. While one version of the film took place on a “massive train,” the iteration Carter was involved in envisioned scream queen Mia Goth as a vampire villain named Lillith who was on the hunt for Blade’s daughter. While Goth remains connected to the project, it would’ve been neat to imagine the costume designers Carter might have crafted for both her and Ali had the period-piece reboot come to life.
All’s well that ends well, for those outside the Marvel section of the vampire-fan Venn diagram, at least. As both word of mouth and empirical box office numbers can attest, Carter’s move from Blade to Sinners proved instrumental in propelling Coogler’s vampire film into the stratosphere as one of 2025’s must-watch movies. Hopefully, the in-development Blade film will avoid becoming a fleeting Wikipedia footnote in the shadow of another film’s success and get to day walk into theaters sometime in the foreseeable future.
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