Kevin Feige is being open about the long-overdue Blade reboot, saying that he believes it hasn’t been good enough despite having worked on it for so long.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, host Joshua Horowitz jokingly asked Kevin Feige how much “therapy” he had needed over the troubled production.
“This poor project. We just need to get this done, Kevin. How are you doing?
The film producer quipped:
“Should we get into a therapy session?”
Kevin Feige, the Marvel Studios president, said he was thrilled to bring Wesley Snipes back as Blade for a cameo in Deadpool & Wolverine, but expressed disappointment over the stalled reboot starring Mahershala Ali.
“I’m feeling very excited that we got Wesley back for a time in Deadpool & Wolverine, and like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”
Marvel first announced Ali as the new Blade during San Diego Comic Con in 2019, with the two-time Academy Award winner making a surprise appearance wearing a Blade cap.
The reboot was meant to be an introduction of the vampire killer into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), but the film ran into many difficulties throughout development, including frequent rescheduling of its premiere, directors leaving the project, and even a complete rewrite.
Finally, in December 2024, Disney decided to pull the film from theatres.
Kevin Feige’s Blade movie plans: “It had to be unique”
Kevin Feige also explained in a July 2025 interview with reporters their plans for the film to be distinctive.
“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.”
The director added:
“We didn’t feel like, as we often do, we 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 Ali and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Kevin Feige continued, citing the “over-expansion” of Disney as causing the delay of the movie’s release. He revealed:
“We had spent 12 years working on the Infinity Saga, saying, ‘That’s never going to happen to us.’ We always had more characters that people were asking about than we could possibly make, because we weren’t going to make a movie a month — that’s crazy. Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more, and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ … But maybe that’s what we fell into.”
Wesley Snipes originally portrayed Blade in the 1998 film, followed by Blade II in 2002 and Blade: Trinity in 2004. With Deadpool & Wolverine, Ali was the first movie to be featured as Blade after an absence of nearly two decades.
As of writing, Marvel has not announced a new release date for Ali’s version of Blade.
Edited by Gladys Altamarino