Mahershala Ali calls out Marvel for cancelled Blade film and agrees it is "biggest failure" of MCU boss Kevin Feige's career

Since the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched with Iron Man back in 2008, there have been an astonishing 38 feature films released in the franchise – with countless more already in various stages of development for the future.

But one film that never managed to get the go ahead despite being in the works for many years is a reboot of popular comic book character Blade, who was previously played by Wesley Snipes in a trilogy between 1998 and 2004.

For a long time, double Oscar winner Mahershala Ali had been attached to play the super-powered vampire hunter, while the project went through various potential directors including Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange.

A huge number of writers were also said to be working on a script for the film over the years, but – after much speculation – it became clear earlier this year that the project was dead.

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Ali has now commented on the failure to get the movie off the ground, explaining during a recent interview with GQ that he was just as baffled as fans as to why no progress could be made.

"That’s a Kevin Feige question," he responded when asked about the issue. "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."

He added: "I don’t mean anything personal to you, but I don’t know why it didn’t. To this day, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that it was... Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree."

Marvel Studios chief Feige had made those comments on an episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, explaining that he was "feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala".

Ali added in the GQ interview: "100 per cent. He should feel that way."

Ali ended up teaming with the originally attached director for the scrapped film, Bassam Tariq, on a new action thriller titled Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

The film will have its UK premiere at the London Film Festival next month before getting a full release on Friday 20 November.

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Authors

Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.