The Marvel Cinematic Universe doesn’t seem to be able to figure out what to do with Blade. Academy Award winning actor Mahershala Ali was meant to play the sword-wielding, day-walking vampire in the superhero blockbuster movie universe, but after years of blunders and confusion, it seems that may no longer be the case.

The character was teased at the end of Eternals, where the voice of Mahershela Ali was heard speaking to Dane Whitman, who was being set up to be Black Knight. This could have been a tease for individual movies or a Midnight Sons project. Either way, it was clearly meant to lead up to something especially cool. 

Supposedly, the original script for the MCU’s Blade movie was a mess, and even focused on other characters more than Blade himself. Rumor has it that several more scripts were attempted, but they were all just as bad. Scripts kept changing and the release date kept getting pushed back until the film was cancelled altogether.

It’s possible for an entirely different Blade movie to be made eventually with a different actor, but why is it so hard for Marvel to make a Blade movie in the first place? There are already three older Blade movies that still hold up. That alone proves that a Blade movie is possible. Surely the cinematic universe famous for bringing comic book heroes to the big screen can do that with modern technology and a modern budget.

Outside of the existence of those three movies, Blade is a half-human half-vampire with a sword who battles other vampires with his martial arts skills. How does that not easily translate to a series of several movies? That’s just plain awesome. 

There are also decades of comic books to pull from for a story. Why not simply adapt the source material? There’s so much existing lore that it would surely be easy enough to pull the characters and stories from the page to put on screen. There’s no need to make major changes to muddy the scripts, which is what apparently happened behind the scenes.

Marvel and Disney could always bring Blade in, whether it be in his own standalone movie, a Disney+ series, or a crossover event like The Avengers. Maybe it’ll be Mahershala Ali, Westley Snipes, or someone else entirely. There’s no knowing what they’ll do with the character in live action, if they ever do anything with him again. We’ll see what happens, but surely it can’t be that hard to get a Blade film off the ground.

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