Marvel’s Blade reboot is canceled: Deadpool & Wolverine’s joke is now real

By August 2026, Marvel Studios’ Blade reboot was, for all practical purposes, dead. The film had been announced back in 2019 with Mahershala Ali attached, then spent years in limbo, never made it to production, and in the process gave Deadpool & Wolverine’s funniest Blade joke a much stranger, more awkward aftertaste.

Disney+ Download

Marvel announced the project in 2019, but over the next seven years Blade never got in front of cameras. Reports pointed to a revolving door of writers, and directors, repeated trouble finding a script that actually worked, the added disruption of the 2023 writers’ strike, release-date slippage from 2023 to 2025, and then, eventually, quiet removal from Marvel’s calendar altogether.

By August 2026, Ali was openly saying he’d moved on. He also said the movie would’ve happened if Marvel had really wanted to make it. That pretty much closed the book on Marvel Studios’ Blade reboot.

And if you’ve followed this saga the whole way through, the odd result is hard to miss: Wesley Snipes is, once again, the only actor who’s actually played Blade in a released movie.

That also changes the feel of Snipes’ Deadpool & Wolverine cameo. His line, “There’s only been one Blade, there’s only ever gonna be one Blade,” played as a meta joke at the time. Now it reads like an accidental statement of record.

Kevin Feige had already admitted in July 2026 that he felt like a “gigantic loser and failure” over not getting Blade made with Ali, adding that the various scripts never cleared Marvel’s bar.

So Snipes still stands alone. And now there are fresh questions around Arkane Lyon’s Blade game too, along with reports that some staff tied to that project had gone unpaid.