Blade Loses Another Director
Blade can kill vampires with the best of them, but he can’t seem to escape development hell. After a revolving door of writers and scripts, production delays, and jokes from the peanut gallery (not that I’m bragging), Marvel’s Blade reboot has now lost its second director, as The Wrap exclusively reports that Yann Demange has left the film. Demange replaced Bassam Tariq, who jumped ship in September 2022, which gives you an idea of how much trouble this production has gone through. He also got Disney and Marvel to agree to let Blade be rated R, which many doubted would happen beforehand. Demange’s departure comes after more reports of bad scripts and new writers, plus word that Mahershala Ali may be headed out the door as well.
What a fiasco. Marvel’s Blade reboot has been a joke since it was announced, and I don’t buy The Wrap’s assurance that Marvel is focused on “getting Blade right.” If that were the case, there wouldn’t have been scripts where Blade played fourth fiddle to a group of girls. The only version of that I’d believe is if Marvel realizes they have to get something, anything, right, and Blade is one of the few they can still fix because it hasn’t started filming yet. (It’d be nice if they felt this way about The Fantastic 4.) And they may be in an even worse position now because all signs point to Mahershala Ali finally washing his hands of this disaster – not the least of which is that he is going to star in the new Jurassic World movie, which has an earlier release date than Blade. Unless Blade is delayed long enough that he can film Jurassic World 4 before it starts, I think he’s going with the movie that has a better chance of seeing a theater at some point. The good thing for Marvel, at least from a scheduling standpoint, is that their directors aren’t in as much control of their films as one normally would be, so it probably won’t matter much whether Yann Demange’s replacement likes whatever script they’re going with when he’s hired. But at this point, I think the most surprising thing Blade can do is get made.
Comments (4)
Seriously, how long is he supposed to wait around while these idiots try to find their ass with two hands? His career will probably be better off anyway.
They’re needing all this time to figure out how to character-assassinate Blade next and bench him for a new girlboss.
At least one of the scripts they threw out was like that. They keep trying to shoe-horn in a daughter. That’s why I don’t buy their “We just want it to be the best it can be” nonsense. If they did, they’d never have even gone down that road.
Mahershala Ali should leave and sue for back pay. Everything they touch right now is being turned into some kind of witch cult full of feminism. In the comics, they were trying to make Blade kind of interesting, but they added the daughter character. Blood Hunt in the comics right now is a major event.
Other writers were doing things with the Vampires, so Marvel jumped on board and is hacking a lot lately.