Mahershala Ali Says Marvel Basically Paid for His New Movie by Funding His Blade Training
Few Marvel projects have generated quite as much prolonged frustration as the studio’s long-stalled ‘Blade’ reboot. The film cycled through multiple directors and writers, burned through four different release dates, and never shot a single frame despite Mahershala Ali being announced in the role all the way back in 2019 at San Diego Comic-Con.
Bassam Tariq, the filmmaker originally hired to direct that reboot, exited the project in 2022, and Marvel eventually pulled the film from its release calendar entirely without production ever beginning. Rather than let the year-plus of sword and combat training Ali underwent for the role go to waste, he and Tariq found a different outlet for it.
That outlet turned out to be ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,’ the pair’s new action drama that just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. Speaking to press at the festival, Ali pointed out a strange bit of irony in how the film came together, noting that Marvel effectively helped fund the production by paying for the extensive combat training he never got to use as Blade.
Ali explained that the physical preparation he put in for a Marvel movie that ultimately fell apart became the exact foundation the much smaller independent film needed to build its own action sequences around. Without that year of training already covered, he suggested, the production likely wouldn’t have been able to afford to stage the film’s combat work at the level it ultimately achieved.
The film casts Ali as Latif, a devoutly religious hitman who embarks on a desperate journey across Houston to protect his children after his wife’s death. John Cho, Giancarlo Esposito, Tiffany Boone, Tramell Tillman, Abubakr Ali, and Laith Nakli round out the supporting cast, with Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures handling distribution.
The connection between the two projects runs deeper than shared choreography. Tariq began writing the script during the pandemic, drawing on a harrowing personal experience involving his wife’s medical emergency shortly after the birth of their first child, and he reportedly named the lead character after Ali in early drafts while writing it with the actor already in mind.
By the time ‘Blade’ was formally scrapped, Tariq had the time and creative space to finish the script and bring it back to Ali, whose own schedule had opened up as the Marvel project continued to stall. The film is set for a limited theatrical release beginning September 25, before expanding wider in October.
Ali has been candid elsewhere about closing the book on ‘Blade’ entirely. In a separate interview tied to the same press run, he made clear he considers the project dead as far as his own involvement goes, framing the years of delays as simply not meant to be his path forward despite having been under contract the entire time.
That larger context makes his gratitude toward Marvel’s unintentional contribution to ‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’ land as more bittersweet than resentful. What could have been a wasted year of preparation for a movie that never happened instead became the backbone of a project Ali seems considerably more excited to have people see, and one that lets him show off physical skills audiences had been waiting years to see him use on screen.
First trailer for ‘YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER YOUR MOTHER’, starring Mahershala Ali, Tramell Tillman and Giancarlo Esposito.
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) June 26, 2026
The film follows a religious hitman who struggles to balance work, faith & fatherhood.
In theaters on October 9. pic.twitter.com/Pl2P3HFkST
The timing also means Ali arrives at this press run with an unusually clean narrative to tell. Rather than fielding endless questions about when ‘Blade’ might finally happen, he now has a finished, well-received film to point to as proof that the training wasn’t wasted after all, even if it ended up serving a story with nothing to do with vampires or the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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