Mahershala Ali has revealed that Marvel was planning to reboot Blade as a TV show rather than a movie before he was cast.
The actor has worked with Marvel before, playing villain Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes in the first season of Netflix’s Luke Cage series – and it was back then when he approached the studio about playing Blade.
“So, in doing that show [Luke Cage], the day it premiered I turned to my agent and I said, ‘What are they doing with Blade?’” Ali told The Tight Rope podcast. “Because I kept hearing that they were trying to find a way to remake it and put it back together, and it was exciting for me to get to be in that Marvel space in TV, but for me, my goal had always been film.”
Ali also revealed that part of the reason he wanted to play Blade is that he was compared to Snipes in high school. “People used to joke and say that we looked alike and all this stuff,” he said.
Ali was cast as Blade at San Diego Comic Con in 2019, although the movie doesn’t have a release date yet and will be part of the MCU’s Phase 5. The original Blade trilogy starred Wesley Snipes as the vampire-hunting titular antihero. The first movie was released in 1998 and was an R-rated blood-and-guts fest – a far cry from the family-friendly output of the MCU. Guillermo del Toro directed the 2002 sequel and the final instalment came out in 2004.
