One of Marvel’s Many Scrapped Scripts for ‘Blade’ Had the Titular Character Relegated to ‘The Fourth Lead’

The MCU Blade is cursed. Marvel Studios acquired the rights to the character way back in 2011, although it wasn’t until 2019 that Kevin Feige revealed a new take on the character and confirmed that Mahershala Ali would star as the day walker.

From then on Blade caught in development hell, lost its original director Bassam Tariq, after pushing back the production start date several times, rewrites the entire script, and was severely affected by Hollywood strikes.

Now Variety has published a far-reaching revelation about the behind-the-scenes troubles at Marvel Studios pertaining to Bladeand one bit of information that has raised our eye so far is in danger of going into orbit:

“With Mahershala Ali signed on for the equal role of a vampire, things were looking very promising for a 2023 release date. But the project has had at least five writers, two directors and one shutdown six weeks before production. One person familiar with the script’s trade-offs says that at one point the story morphed into a female-driven narrative full of life lessons. Blade was relegated to fourth place, a strange idea considering the studio’s two-time Oscar winner Ali was on board.

Let the record show that we’re not against a female-led story that delivers life lessons, but an action movie about a leather-clad vampire slicing and crushing an army of evil vampires might not be the place to do it. And relegating Blade with a little part in Blade movie? Maybe not the smartest move.

This script was thankfully thrown in the trash, although Ali didn’t threaten to walk:

Amid reports that Ali was ready to walk away over script issues, Feige went back to the drawing board and hired Oscar-nominated “Logan” writer Michael Green to start over. Speculation in town is that the studio is looking to make the film, now slated for 2025, on a budget of less than $100 million – a departure from Marvel’s big-spending strategy.

Well on one hand giving the Location writer in to write Blade it is a promising measure. On the other hand, it might not be too good to cut its budget significantly below other MCU films. Let’s be optimistic and hope the money is spent on a street-level based story that lives up to it Blade the origin of the story.

Then again, at this point maybe they should retroactively fold the existing one Blade movies into the MCU and will bring Snipes back for one last vampire B-movie romp.