Mahershala Ali’s Blade Movie Delayed Once Again
Mahershala Ali's Blade will no longer be released in September 2024, pushed back to February 2025.
We’re entering a season of change as Disney recently announced a massive overhaul to their theatrical release schedule, according to The Hollywood Reporter. In addition to titles such as the next three Avatar movies being delayed by years, it’s been reported that Mahershala Ali’s Blade will be bumped from its September 2024 release date to a Valentine’s Day release in 2025. Blade was first announced at the San Diego Comic-Con back in 2019, and will be the final film in the MCU’s Phase 5 slate.
Though some of the announced changes to the release calendar are a strategic way to space out major big-budget movies, Marvel projects like Thunderbolts, and of course, Mahershala Ali’s Blade are now seeing a delayed production due to the ongoing writers strike. If all goes according to plan, Blade will begin production this summer in Atlanta.
This isn’t the first setback that the Blade reboot has seen. In fact, the film originally had a November 3 2023 release date, but it was pushed back due to a change in director. Though there haven’t been many announcements in regard to casting, we know at the very least that Yann Demange will be at the helm as director in place of Bassam Tariq, and that Mahershala Ali will be taking on the role of Blade; a role that he’s been itching to play for quite some time.
Mahershala Ali made his first appearance as Blade in 2021’s Eternals in which he had an uncredited voice cameo in a post-credits scene. Though we’re spanning years for Blade to have a proper full-screen treatment, it was this cameo that secured Ali’s place in the upcoming Marvel film. And if his excitement over the role is any indication of whether this reboot will be worth the wait, we’re going to assume that Blade will live up to, and exceed our expectations.
Though revisiting the iconic daywalker that Wesley Snipes portrayed in the past is no easy feat, Mahershala Ali has stated that he wanted to be considered for the role of Blade ever since talks of a remake started circulating. Not only is Ali drawn to portraying Blade due to the dark nature of the original trilogy, but he has gone on record stating that he’s had a connection to Wesley Snipes that dates back to his high school days.
Luckily, Mahershala Ali has been quite busy the past few years, and there are plenty of projects he’s been involved in that will most certainly tide you over while you’re waiting for Blade‘s release. And if you need a primer on some of Ali’s darker roles, we’d suggest looking back at 2019’s season 3 of True Detective in which he took on the lead role of Wayne Hays, a state police detective and Vietnam veteran involved in a decades old case involving two missing children. On the cinematic front, you can see Mahershala Ali in the upcoming Netflix psychological thriller Leave the World Behind, which is slated for a December 8, 2023 release.
