Blade: Behind-the-Scenes Meetings With Kevin Feige and Mahershala Ali Revealed By Writer

The development on Marvel Studios’ reboot of Blade is on and now, a couple of now-deleted Instagram Stories tell us how deeply Marvel Studios is involved in working on the project. As noticed by The Direct, screenwriter for Blade Stacy Osei-Kuffour had shared a few images of Zoom meetings between herself and various key Marvel executives and personnel that are currently attached to Blade. These include Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, director Bassam Tariq, producer Louis D’Esposito, producer Eric Hausserman Carroll, and star Mahershala Ali. The Direct further revealed that in one image Marvel Boss Kevin Feige can be seen wearing his Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings hat, which means these might be a bit old.

Check it out for yourself here:

While very little is actually known about the Blade film, all we know is that Mahershala Ali is attached to it and that the project is in the works. No plot details or release dates have been confirmed for the project yet and the only other casting that’s been reported is the addition of star Delroy Lindo, of Da 5 Bloods and The Harder They Fall, who is reportedly in talks with the studio. Marvel has already given us a tease of Blade earlier in 2021 as Ali delivered a line off-camera during the mid-credits scene of Eternals, setting up his own solo movie but also possibly an appearance by Dane Whitman aka The Black Knight (played by Kit Harington).

Although only Ali’s voice can be heard, the actor had previously revealed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert that it kept him up all night.

“Like I was losing sleep over this line because, ideally, you want to be talking once you are filming,” the Oscar winner said. “And 100% of the times, my first day on any set, on any job, I hate it. Like, I hate how I sound, I don’t believe myself, you know, and so you’re trying to like get comfortable in the character. So to have to talk before you’re even actually filming was challenging, but I’m grateful for it, because it made it feel real. I made it… It’s like ‘Okay, now we’re going.'”

“[Blade] was [part of the scene] for reasons hopefully that would become apparent as you see more things, but [Mahershal Ali] wasn’t there on the day,” Eternals producer Nate Moore explained on ComicBook.com’s Phase Zero podcast. “And we talked about two versions of that, one where we would cut to him and one where we wouldn’t. ‘How textual do you want it to be?’ And again, it was more just for the fun of it, to tease it a little bit, to hear the voice and not see the man. He was game to do it. Because the Ebony Blade, the characteristics of the Ebony Blade are not dissimilar to some degree to vampirism and we think that’s an interesting kind of thing to play with. So, we kind of knew that was on the table.”