Summary

• Blade movie has faced delays due to COVID-19, director changes, and production struggles, pushing release to 2025 after initial 2019 announcement.
• Blade's unique challenge is standing out from previous films, grappling with complex storyline, and avoiding negative stereotypes in modern adaptation.
• Mahershala Ali's involvement in Blade brings a new level of creative control, and Marvel has big plans for Blade across various media platforms.

Marvel Studios has adapted many characters from the comics, no matter how minor or strange. From Doctor Strange to the Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man, it appears that no character was too difficult for Marvel to pull off into making a Marvel Cinematic Universe film. Yet one title that has been a struggle with them is Blade. First announced at Comic-Con 2019, the movie has had three different release dates, and if it can maintain its current November 7, 2025 release date, it will have arrived six years from when it was first announced. For reference, that is the same period from when Robert Downey Jr. was cast as Iron Man to the release of The Avengers.

The movie's delays have been cited as due to a number of issues behind the scenes, including changes to the script and a director change. What makes this frustrating to many fans is Blade was the first Marvel hero to get a successful live-action movie back in 1998 with the film Blade, starring Wesley Snipes. After making three movies, the common critique is, "How hard is it to make a Blade movie?" While Blade, on the surface, might seem like an easy character to bring to the big screen, there are a lot of factors that make Blade one of the most difficult properties to adapt in the MCU.

Real World Delays

The biggest factor that has impacted Blade is, of course, one beyond the control of the movie. While the film was announced in 2019, all development in 2020 was stalled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the movie was in pre-production, a release date could not be set as Marvel Studios had releases like Black Widow, Eternals, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings to name a few waiting to be released. It was shortly after the release of Thor: Love and Thunder in 2022 that Marvel officially set a release date for Blade, set to be released on November 3, 2023, as part of Phase 5.

However, in September 2022, the previously attached director, Bassam Tariq, dropped out of the movie due to the delayed schedule. The movie then gained current director Yann Demange in November 2022, which also happened to be the initial production start month. The film was then delayed to September 6, 2024, but right as filming was starting to gear up in the summer of 2023, production halted due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike, which forced them to delay the film's release to November 7, 2025, which now makes it part of Phase 6.

Marvel Has to Make Blade Stand Out

For the most part, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has adapted stories that have either never been adapted into live-action (Iron Man, The Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther) or those that had very small, barely seen interpretations from years prior (Thor, Captain America, Doctor Strange), which allowed them to start from a clean slate. They got to define the characters for audiences and bring what comic book reading audiences wanted.

Marvel Studios finds this challenge of giving audiences something familiar while also offering their distinct interpretation of the material with their upcoming reboots of Fantastic Four and The X-Men, and it appears Blade faces a similar problem. The Wesley Snipes Blade films created the modern image of what audiences think of the character, so much so that it has influenced the comics. So, the MCU film can't just be a repeat of what has come before, or it risks audiences feeling like they are getting a movie they've already seen.

The MCU Needs to Grapple with a Storyline That Blade: Trinity Ignored

Blade's story revolves around Eric Brooks, a human-vampire hybrid who received his powers when his mother was bitten by a vampire when she was pregnant. This gave Blade all of a vampire's strengths but none of their weakness except a thirst for blood. His ability to walk in the sun earned him the title of Daywalker, and he spent his life hunting and killing vampires. This served as the backbone for the original Blade trilogy.

While Blade established the character's central origin and mission to kill vampires, the sequel put the character in an interesting position. He was forced to team up with the Vampire Nation to stop a worse threat, a genetically altered breed called the Reapers, who could turn humans into vampires at rapid rates and feed much quicker. However, Blade was also forced to confront his own prejudice. Blade hates all vampires and makes it his life's mission to kill them, but in a conversation with Nyssa Damaskinos (Leonor Varela), she points out to him that she was born a vampire, and she has had no choice. While there are clearly evil vampires, there are also good ones. This seemed to lay the groundwork for Blade's arc in the third film to confront his binary worldview of vampires.

But that's not what happened. Blade: Trinity instead opted to return to evil vampires, with the humans coming up with an air-born virus that would kill all vampires, known as "the Death Star." While this form of genocide would normally be cause for concern and the fact that it is no different than the vampire's own final solution, which could make for some interesting commentary, the movie completely ignores tackling those interesting topics. In recent years, the topic of a fully evil race or species in sci-fi and fantasy has come under scrutiny for enforcing negative stereotypes, one that the MCU Blade film must grapple with.

This is actually an angle the MCU Blade could explore that would help it stand apart from his previous film depictions. If Blade starts out as a cold-blooded vampire-hunting killer but is then forced to confront his own prejudice, seeing vampires not as monsters but capable of both good and bad, it gives him both an arc but allows the MCU character to comment and subvert some expectations about the previous film incarnation. Recently, Marvel Comics has seen Blade become a sheriff of the vampire nation, and this is an angle the Marvel Cinematic Universe could explore. Blade can still hunt corrupt villainous vampires but must also protect and serve innocent ones.

Blade's Star Is Heavily Involved with the Project

Blade will star Mahershala Ali, a two-time Academy Award-winning actor who famously was the one to pitch Marvel Studios on a new Blade movie instead of the other way around. Marvel Studios likely did not have Blade high up on their priority list until Ali wanted to join, so much about developing the movie likely relates to how happy the star is with the project. Ali already had a voice cameo in Eternals, and likely, the plan was to fast-track his film. If Ali isn't happy with the script, then it needs to be reworked since this project, as it exists, only exists because of him. This is a sharp contrast to how Marvel typically develops their films, with the emphasis on the character and finding a star later.

Even casting Academy Award-winning Brie Larson for Carol Danvers, Marvel had already been working on and developing Captain Marvel prior. While they worked with Larson to develop the character, the movie was already a priority, while Blade likely only exists now on the MCU slate because Ali wanted to play the character, and Marvel Studios lept at the chance to have an Oscar winner wanting to lead one of their films. This means Ali likely has a certain level of creative control over a character and his films not seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Robert Downey Jr. renegotiated his contract following the success of Iron Man.

Marvel Has Big Plans for Blade

It is clear that when Marvel Studios announced Ali as Blade in 2019, they were already making moves behind the scenes to push Blade to be front and center in the public eye. While the character was featured rather prominently in the mid-2000s Marvel products and comics, including an appearance in the 2006 game Marvel Ultimate Alliance, for nearly a decade, he was largely absent from a lot of larger Marvel media. Shortly before Ali was announced as Blade, the character was added to the Avengers roster in the comics, while two months after Ali's Blade announcement was made, it was confirmed the character would be a DLC character for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3.

Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a major delay in Blade's release date, but Marvel's other subsidiaries were clearly building up Blade's status. The comics really started to push him as he was one of the central characters in the 2021 event Heroes Reborn and the recently released Blood Hunt. He became one of the stars of 2022's Midnight Suns comic series, and in 2023, which was the original release year for his film, he got two major comics. The first was his own solo title, simply called Blade, with another title, Bloodline: Daughter of Blade, which introduced Brielle Brooks, the character's daughter.

Meanwhile, Blade was featured as a main character in 2022's Midnight Suns video game and was recently confirmed to get his own solo video game developed by Arkane Lyon and published by Bethesda Softworks. No date has been confirmed, but likely, the hope is for the game to come out close to the release of the MCU film. With Marvel pushing Blade in the comics and other media, it is clear they have big plans for him in the MCU, but getting that single film is a bit more difficult than some fans might want to admit.