CUT DOWN

Two-Time Oscar Winner Accuses Marvel of Kicking Him to Curb

Despite a contract and “billions of dollars,” Marvel screwed over Mahershala Ali.

Two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali confirmed he won’t star in Marvel’s Blade, despite having a contract—and he’s blaming the billion-dollar studio for screwing it up.

Seven years after Marvel devotees erupted in celebration at the glitzy, surprise announcement at Comic Con, the acclaimed actor said he is no longer playing the half-human, half-vampire vigilante.

“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not,” Ali, who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar twice in three years for Moonlight and then Green Book, said in an interview with GQ. “For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on.”

Blade’s delays were, in part, a result of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Unlike other Marvel projects, like Deadpool & Wolverine and Thunderbolts, Blade let most of its actors go. The drawn-out process grew longer when director Yann Demange departed the project in 2024. He was the second director—following Bassam Tariq—to leave Blade since its inception. Blade was trapped in “development hell,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote, calling the film “a series of stops and starts” before its eventual demise.

Though he’s disappointed, Ali is tired of the will-they/won’t-they nature of Blade’s journey. He’s now starring in Tariq’s (much smaller) upcoming film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which follows a devoutly religious hitman coping with his wife’s death and fatherhood.

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“Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother feels very much in alignment with the type of work I want to be known for,” Ali said. “I don’t really want to be known for remakes. I’d love to do original work that resonates with people and impacts them in unique ways. So, I’m good. Again, you had me under contract; they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”

Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige, who announced Ali’s casting, blamed Blade’s dissolution on script issues and expressed regret about the film’s downward trajectory.

“I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala,” Feige said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade,’ and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

Ali, 52, said he remains excited about his career trajectory. His training for Blade helped him step into the role of a hitman, and he said that Blade’s winding spiral paved the way for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. He would choose Tariq’s script every time.

“When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me,” he said. “And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for Blade.”

Though Blade has proved a failure, it helped Ali better understand himself as an actor. And, as for Blade’s demise, he’s sick of talking about it.

“I feel creatively redeemed on some level, just in my own journey between me, myself, and I,” he said. “But I feel ready to move on from the Blade questions. Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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