It’s official, we’re not getting Marvel’s much-anticipated Blade reboot, after all. Well, at least for the time being. Disney has officially wiped the Mahershala Ali vehicle from its 2025 calendar, proving that Wesley Snipes’ wise Deadpool & Wolverine prophecy was as spot on as we feared. And, to rub salt in the (neck) wound, we have not one, but two MCU stars making vampire movies instead.
Yes, if I had a nickel for every time a Marvel veteran was announced to be starring in a vamp-flavored film while Marvel publicly and embarrassingly failed to make Blade, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened twice. The latest example of this unlikely trend concerns confirmed Spider-Man 4 protagonist Tom Holland, who we know is teaming up with Christopher Nolan for the Oppenheimer director’s next project.
While it’s yet to be announced, the word on the grapevine states that Nolan will be breaking out into the horror genre for the first time with his new film, as it’s rumored to be “a period horror about vampires in the 1920s.” In other words, it sounds like Nolan could be developing a kind of Interview with a Vampire for our times with Holland and Matt Damon in the leads.
The funny thing is, though, that Holland is not the first Marvel graduate to get a vampire movie off the ground while Blade remains trapped in its coffin. Black Panther‘s own Ryan Coogler is partnering up with Michael B. Jordan once again for their upcoming offering, Sinners. Ironically, this one already flipped Blade the bird when it swiped Delroy Lindo — who was supposed to appear opposite Ali in the film before he ditched it to work with Coogler instead.
Nolan vs. Coogler? The battle of the auteur vampire movie? Do we have a new Barbenheimer on our hands?
If the rumors are true and Nolan is realizing his own take on vampires while Coogler is doing the same, yet Marvel — who has a vast, pre-existing lore to draw from that does half the work for them — can’t make Blade… Well, that would just be the latest humiliation for an MCU movie that seems doomed to remain trapped in the ninth circle of development hell.
Putting the Blade of it all to the side for a second, though, can we all just appreciate these three beautiful words: vampire Tom Holland. Huge if true.
To be fair to Blade, it’s not out of the realms of possibility that Marvel could pull it together in the next couple of years and Ali’s version of the monster hunter finally sees the light of day as one of those three new MCU films Disney just scheduled for 2028. And yet, if both Nolan and Coogler manage to wow audiences and critics with their own stamps on the vampire genre, it might make Marvel’s already herculean task even more difficult. The stakes just got higher, you might say.
