Kevin Feige Admits ‘Blade’ Struggled from Marvel’s Quantity Focus, Shares Hopeful Update for Fans

Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige has shared a new update about the long-delayed Blade movie. Speaking to TheWrap and other reporters, Feige explained that the film’s struggles were caused by Marvel’s focus on making too many projects too quickly.

He admitted that Blade became a victim of what he called the company’s “quantity over quality” phase.

Mahershala Ali is still set to play Blade, the half-human vampire hunter. But according to Feige, Marvel paused the project after they realized the script just wasn’t good enough. “We didn’t feel confident,” Feige said, explaining that they have already worked through four versions of the script.

He added, “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique and it fell right into the time when we started pulling back and saying ‘only accept insanely great’ and it wasn’t insanely great at the time.”

Feige spoke openly about Marvel’s recent struggles. He admitted that the push to fill Disney+ with content forced the studio to focus on quantity instead of quality. “We had spent 12 years working on the ‘Infinity Saga’ saying that’s never going to happen to us. And we always had more characters that people were asking about than we could possibly make because we weren’t going to make a movie a month, that’s crazy,” Feige said.

But when Disney told Marvel to make more shows and movies, Feige said they agreed. “Suddenly there’s a mandate to make more and we go, ‘Well, we do have more’ and it led to the expansion and ‘Blade’ came up with that as well.”

He also pointed out how much Marvel content was produced in a short time. Feige said, “We made maybe 51 hours of stories between 2007 and 2019. So 12 or 13 years for 51 hours of stories. In the six years since, we’ve had well over 100 hours of stories in half the time. That’s too much.”

As for Blade, Feige said Marvel didn’t want to move forward until the script was truly great. Normally, Marvel improves scripts during production. But with Blade, Feige explained, “We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can start and have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade’ and didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

Feige revealed that earlier versions of the script included both period and modern-day settings, but the team has now decided to set the story in modern times. “There were three or four, two that were period two that are not. We’ve landed on modern day and that’s what we’re focusing on,” he said.

Right now, Marvel’s Eric Pearson, who recently worked on Fantastic Four, is writing the current version of the Blade script. Previous drafts were written by Michael Starrbury, Nic Pizzolatto, and Michael Green.

Blade has had a long journey. After the original Blade trilogy ended in 2004, Marvel got the rights back in 2011. In 2019, Mahershala Ali approached Marvel about playing Blade, and Kevin Feige announced the project at Comic-Con that same year.

Since then, the movie has gone through several directors and many delays. By mid-2024, Pearson was rewriting the script while Marvel searched for a new director. Later that year, Blade was taken off Marvel’s release schedule.

Even though it’s been a slow and difficult process, Feige’s update shows that Marvel hasn’t given up on bringing Blade back to the big screen.

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