The fact that there was going to be a Blade reboot as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring Mashershala Ali in the title role, came as a huge surprise when the announcement was made at the San Diego Comic-Con back in July of 2019… but we’re coming up on the six year anniversary of that announcement, and we still haven’t seen a new Blade movie. The closest we’ve gotten is Ali making a vocal cameo as the character at the end of Eternals back in 2021. Now, we don’t know if we’re going to get a Blade reboot at all – but we have received confirmation that, at some point in the development process, the movie was going to be set in the 1920s and the plan was for recording artist Flying Lotus, who recently made his feature directorial debut with the sci-fi horror film Ash, to provide some music for it.
There have been rumblings of Blade being set in the 1920s for a while now, and during a podcast interview with Robert Meyer Burnett, costume designer Ruth E. Carter – who worked with director Ryan Coogler on his newly released, 1930s-set vampire movie Sinners – confirmed that she had been working on a 1920s-set version of Blade before she got the Sinners job. Talking about how that job came about, Carter said, “I was prepping Blade for Marvel and it was a 1920s Blade story. It got shut down because of the writers strike and the actors strike and so I was just in limbo, having done a lot of research for this period piece about a vampire – Blade is a vampire story. Ryan (Coogler)’s wife, Zinzi, who also was a producer on the picture (Sinners), she gave me a call and said, ‘I’m not gonna tell you the story, but Ryan has a story he’s going to tell you about, I can’t do it justice like he can, so I’m not going to get into the details, but it is a period piece about vampires.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, I have already been living in that space for quite a long time prepping Blade, and Blade‘s not going to happen, so let me hear it.’“
As for Flying Lotus, he shared his heartbreak on no longer being attached to Blade in a tweet: “I guess we are so far from it even being a possibility now but. Yeah I was signed on to write music for the new Blade movie before it fell thru. Maybe it’ll come around again but I doubt it. Would have been fun tho.“
Last year, we heard a rumor that Mahershala Ali is getting “increasingly frustrated” with the long development process on this one. Delroy Lindo and Aaron Pierre have been cast alongside Ali as the years have gone by, but are no longer involved, as their characters have apparently been written out. Lindo, who has a role in Sinners, recently shared some information on who his Blade character would have been. Co-star Mia Goth, who is rumored to be playing the villainous Lilith, is still attached – and she has said that she’s fine with the delays, because it shows that Marvel really cares about the project.
Writers who have worked on the script include Stacy Osei-Kuffour (Watchmen), Michael Starrbury (When They See Us), True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto (who worked with Ali on season 3 of that show), Beau DeMayo (The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf), Michael Green (Logan), and Eric Pearson, who has worked on Thor: Ragnarok, Black Widow, Thunderbolts*, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Would you like to see a Blade reboot that was set in the 1920s and/or one that would feature Flying Lotus music? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
