Shortly after the Blade reboot was officially announced, Kevin Feige revealed that rather than the project having already been in development when Ali came aboard, the actor pitched the reboot in a meeting to Feige and the Marvel brass shortly after he won an Oscar for his performance in Green Book.
Whatever he said must have been persuasive, because Feige announced the return of Blade to the public months later.
This will be Mahershala Ali’s fourth comic book media project, having previously played Cornell “Cottonmouth” Stokes in Netflix’s Luke Cage, Aaron Davis (a.k.a.
The Prowler) in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Titan in Amazon’s upcoming Invincible animated series.