‘Blade’ Cursed: Marvel’s Reboot Forced to Pause Production Again Amid Writers Strike
Mahershala Ali on the stage of San Diego Comic-Con in July 2019, when it was announced he would be playing Blade.
The writers’ strike that started on May 2 has taken its first major victim, as Marvel Studio has been forced to pause pre-production on Blade for the second time, in what is surely a sign of the movie being cursed.
The Hollywood Reporter broke the news on Friday, saying that cast and crew would be notified in the afternoon, but even regardless of the strike, this is not a good sign for the movie, and here’s why. Cameras were initially intended to roll back in November, but the process was stopped a few weeks before, in late September, as Kevin Feige and star/executive producer Mahershala Ali realized things weren’t working. The writer and the director exited the project, with Michael Starburry picking up the keyboard, and Yann Demange boarding as the new person in charge.
Things were looking better, and a late May production start was given for the new iteration of the movie, but apparently, Marvel was also getting nervous. During the spring, they hired True Detective writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto to work on rewrites of the script, the extent of which was never clear. Well, it seems like “time ran out”, as The Hollywood Reporter‘s sources put it, and they just couldn’t finish the script in time before the strike happened. Now, they are back on pause for however long that one will last.
But the script not being ready just three or four weeks before the movie was supposed to shoot is never a good sign — just think that the most recent badge of Marvel movies, from Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness to Thor: Love and Thunder and especially Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania all went into filming without completed drafts and had to write their third acts while in production. Sometimes that went well for them, like in the case of Spider-Man: No Way Home, which closed a deal for Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield to return a month into filming, forcing the writers to rework the entire third act to include them in it. Other times, it resulted in the worst MCU film according to Rotten Tomatoes’ critic score, as in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
It seemed like the studio was learning from these mistakes and aiming to start shooting with completed screenplays. Case in point, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Captain America: New World Order will continue filming as planned in Atlanta, meaning there aren’t many on-set rewrites needed and the WGA strike might not affect the film. Also scheduled to move forward as normal is Thunderbolts in June, despite a near-page one rewrite that happened on the movie earlier this year by Beef creator Lee Sung Jin. Deadpool 3 was at one point announced to start filming on May 1 in London, but all reports this week suggest that still hasn’t happened; regardless, they all say it will happen very soon this month.
Going back to Blade, it seems like this was not going to be the case, and the film still needed some work. Pizzolatto probably couldn’t turn in his latest draft by May 2, and now, rightfully so, he decided to join the strike (we don’t have confirmation on this, but it seems like it was the case). This is exactly how studios will start to notice the weight of the strike, by pressing Pause on hundred-mill blockbusters that will hurt them in the long run. Meanwhile, across the streets, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav thinks the strike will run out because the writers will be eager to go back to work anyways.
If the strike lasts for six months or more, more Marvel productions will be affected. The next one in line would be Fantastic Four, which is scheduled to begin shooting in January in London. Josh Friedman was tapped earlier this year to rework the script, though it’s unknown its status by the time the strike was announced. Casting is currently underway, and crazy rumors are running wild across Twitter. Regardless of that, though, if the strike went on past Labor Day, Fantastic Four could be affected. Not mentioned by The Hollywood Reporter, too, is Armor Wars, which was at one point rumored to start production in mid-2023, though there hasn’t been a lot of development on that front. In the meantime, Wonder Man is still filming in LA, Agatha: Coven of Chaos in Atlanta, and Daredevil: Born Again in New York.
Blade is currently targeting a September 6, 2024, release date, though that is unlikely to stay. Mia Goth and Delroy Lindo are also part of the cast, alongside Ali.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
