The tortured production timeline of Marvel’s Blade reboot, explained

polygon.com:

Few Marvel projects have been met with the enthusiasm that greeted the studio’s 2019 announcement of a Blade movie starring a two-time Academy Award winner in the title role. But in the five years since that announcement, the movie has been through countless delays and recastings, firing and hirings. And then there were the silent periods with no updates at all, leading us to wonder whether the MCU’s Blade reboot is still happening.

To help you keep track of all the goings-on with Marvel’s tortured Blade movie, we’ve put together a full timeline of everything that’s happened, from the moment it was announced until now. We’ve also included notes on the movies and shows that likely led Marvel to hire each person who’s passed through the project, and explained the reasoning behind them joining in the first place.

Marvel announced Mahershala Ali’s casting in a revamped Blade movie at 2019’s San Diego Comic-Con, mere months after Avengers: Endgame was released. At that point, the MCU was at its apex in terms of popularity and profit, and Marvel was confidently greenlighting a lot of ambitious future projects. Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige had met with Ali a few months earlier, and when Ali said he wanted to do a new movie about Marvel Comics’ vampire-hunter Blade, the studio got to work trying to figure out how to make that happen.

Movie that explains it: Green Book. Ali won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that movie in February 2019 — his second, after winning the same award for his role in 2017’s Moonlight.

In 2021, Marvel announced that Stacy Osei-Kuffour had been hired to write the movie. At the time, The Hollywood Reporter reported that the studio spent more than six months meeting with writers and consulting with Ali before choosing Osei-Kuffour, a veteran playwright, for the project.

Series that explains it: HBO’s Watchmen. Osei-Kuffour was a writer and story editor on that 2019 series.

Bassam Tariq was the first director signed on to direct Blade.