“There’s only been one Blade. There’s only ever gonna be one Blade.” When Wesley Snipes spoke those lines in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, audiences cackled. Sure, Deadpool and the characters around him love to make self-referential jokes, but something about Snipes—playing Blade for the first time since 2004’s Blade: Trinity—delivering the joke hit extra hard.
Comic-book movie lovers know, of course, that Marvel announced a Blade reboot starring Mahershala Ali all the way back in 2019. It’s had a stop-and-start progression since then and slowly became a bit of a punchline, with many fans coming to believe it would never actually happen.
It’s not unheard of in Hollywood that a movie gets announced, then never actually goes into production. But it is unusual when a high-profile Marvel project starring a two-time Oscar winner that was trumpeted from the Hall H stage at San Diego Comic-Con gets quietly shoved to the bottom of the TBD list.
However, Marvel hadn’t made any statement putting Blade to rest until very recently, when Happy Sad Confused podcast host Josh Horowitz came right out and asked Marvel head Kevin Feige for an update on the status of Blade. Horowitz shared the clip in an Instagram reel you can watch here, but this is what they said:
“How much time in therapy have you spent talking about Blade?” Horowitz joked to Feige. “This poor project. We just need to get this done, Kevin … We all want it. Mahershala wants it. How are you feeling at this moment?”
Feige replied, “I’m feeling very excited that we got Wesley back for a time in Deadpool & Wolverine and like a gigantic loser and a failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
So he doesn’t say there will never, ever be a new Blade film, no matter what Deadpool & Wolverine would have us believe. But it sure sounds like the Mahershala Ali Blade movie is no longer in play.
Horowitz also asked if there’s a chance Secret Wars could be two films (no), if Doomsday is sticking to its release date (yes), and what the MCU will look like after Secret Wars arrives in late 2027. “I look to the comics as I always do in terms of our storytelling,” Feige said, after noting he doesn’t consider Secret Wars to be a reboot. “And after both the Secret Wars, but particularly the [Jonathan] Hickman Secret Wars from 10 years ago, there’s a nice road map to where we can go.”
Horowitz also asked if any actors have signed on for X-Men characters that we don’t know about yet, and Feige said, with supreme vagueness, “Not necessarily.”
Perhaps we’ll learn more about that when Marvel’s Hall H panel happens this weekend at San Diego Comic-Con. Marvel didn’t hold its traditional Saturday night panel in 2025, so Feige and company have some catching up to do.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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