Kevin Feige Explains Why Marvel is Struggling with Blade Script: “It Had to Be Unique”

Marvel Studios is still working on its long-delayed Blade movie, but fans might need to wait a little longer. In a new interview with TheWrap and other reporters, Marvel boss Kevin Feige shared why the project has been so slow.

According to him, the studio rushed to make too many shows and movies at once, and Blade ended up being one of the projects that suffered because of it.

Feige said that Mahershala Ali is still set to play the famous vampire hunter. However, Marvel decided to stop and rethink the movie after they realized the script wasn’t good enough. “We didn’t feel confident,” Feige explained, adding that the studio had already gone through four different versions of the story.

He made it clear they didn’t want to make a basic action movie with Blade. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique and it fell right into the time when we started pulling back and saying ‘only accept insanely great’ and it wasn’t insanely great at the time.”

Feige also admitted that Marvel ran into problems because they were producing too many projects, especially when Disney asked for more content to fill Disney+. He said the studio had promised itself that it wouldn’t happen. “We had spent 12 years working on the ‘Infinity Saga’ saying that’s never going to happen to us. And 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.”

But when Disney told Marvel to make more, Feige said they gave in. “Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ and it led to the expansion and ‘Blade’ came up with that as well.”

He explained that from 2007 to 2019, Marvel created around 51 hours of stories. But from 2019 to now, that number more than doubled in half the time. “That’s too much,” Feige admitted.

Normally, Marvel starts filming and fixes the script during production. But for Blade, Feige said that plan wouldn’t work. “We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can start and 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 didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

Earlier versions of Blade’s story were set in different time periods, but Feige confirmed the movie will now take place in the present day. “There were three or four, two that were period, two that are not. We’ve landed on modern day and that’s what we’re focusing on,” he said.

Right now, Eric Pearson, who worked on Marvel’s Fantastic Four movie, is writing the latest version of Blade’s script. Previous versions were written by Michael Starrbury, Nic Pizzolatto, and Michael Green.

Blade’s return has been a long time coming. After the original Blade trilogy ended back in 2004, Marvel got the rights back in 2011.

Actor Mahershala Ali approached Marvel in 2019, saying he wanted to play Blade. Feige announced the movie at Comic-Con that same year. Since then, the film has changed directors and been delayed many times. In 2024, Marvel took Blade off its release schedule while the search for a new director continued and the script was reworked.

Even though the movie’s future is still unclear, Feige made it clear that Marvel hasn’t given up on Blade yet.

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