Mahershala Ali says he still doesn’t know why the long-aborning reboot of Marvel‘s Blade franchise never happened.

“That’s a Kevin Feige question,” the actor told GQ in a recent interview of why the film fell apart. “I don’t know why it did to this day. I don’t know why it didn’t happen. I just know that it was Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree. 100%. He should feel that way.”

For the record, Marvel boss Feige told the Happy Sad Confused podcast of the film in July: “I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.”

Marvel first confirmed the Blade reboot starring Ali at Comic-Con in 2019. But the project was hit with multiple delays, including directors Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange’s exits from the film and the 2023 WGA strike.

Feige hinted at another issue in a 2025 sit-down with the press at Marvel’s Burbank HQ.

“You can start and have a good script and make it a great script through production, but we didn’t feel confident we could do that on Blade,” he said. “We didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

While Ali doesn’t sound bitter about the failed project, he does register some frustration about the five-plus years he put into it.

“I’m saying no to things in that time because they own my schedule basically,” the two time Oscar winner told GQ. “I spent a year training. Yeah. I trained so hard ’til I blew my knee out.”He continued, “I literally moved, uprooted my family. Moved to Atlanta. We’re there waiting to go and they just keep pushing it back pushing it back pushing it and we don’t…it doesn’t happen.”

Ali has since moved on, making a different film with Tariq called Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, which just screened at Toronto. The actor gets to showcase the swordfighting skills he learned for Blade and, more importantly, put his prodigious acting abilities to good use. Deadline called his performance “the glue that binds” the film.

Of his experience with Blade, Ali told GQ, “In the end, the failure became a blessing in disguise. It helped me stop waiting for the golden ticket and start building my own path.”

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