Marvel’s Blade Was Reportedly Going to Be Female-Led Film Before Getting Lower-Budget Revision

Marvel’s Blade reboot movie is at the center of an eye-opening new report about Marvel Studios and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it seems as though the development of the supernatural superhero’s relaunch has been even more chaotic than rumors have suggested. 

In a breakdown by Variety’s Tatiana Siegel, it’s being said that Marvel’s Blade reboot was originally headed in a very different direction than what most fans would expect from a Blade film with multi-Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali as its titular character. The report claims that “the story at one point morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons,” and that “Blade was relegated to the fourth lead” of the film. That angle tracks with Marvel’s recent promotional push of Bloodline: Daughter of Blade in comics this year – a character many speculated the Blade movie was going to focus on. 

To be fair, the larger point of the report on Blade is that the film has gone through multiple revisions during its pre-production, with “at least five writers, two directors and one shutdown six weeks before production,” all having plagued Marvel Studios. Those disruptions and “reports that Ali was ready to exit over script issues” eventually made Kevin Feige go “back to the drawing board,” with the entire concept for an MCU Blade. 

Now it’s being reported that Oscar-nominated Logan writer Michael Green has been brought on board to rewrite the Blade script from scratch – and that Marvel Studios is taking a very different approach with it. Apparently, “Speculation around town is that the studio is looking to make the film, now slated for 2025, on a budget of less than $100 million — a deviation from Marvel’s big-spending strategy.” 

The original Blade movie (1998) was made on a budget of just $45 million, before going on to gross $131.2 million – a feat for an R-rated superhero/horror film at that time. Even though director Stephen Norrington didn’t go on to have the most successful directorial career, his work in Blade still holds up over two decades later, and stands as proof that $100 million isn’t necessary for a quality comic book movie blockbuster. 

In fact, horror is the one other genre besides superheroes that are still guaranteed to win at the box office, and horror has the added appeal of doing so on much smaller budgets than most films. Feige’s instincts are on point if these reports are accurate, as Blade’s horror themes should make it easy to do on a more indie horror-sized budget, rather than a superhero-sized one. 

Marvel’s Blade is in development for 2025.