Anyone still hyped over the Blade reboot coming from Marvel despite its troubled production had better sit down to read this because the news isn’t about to get much better.
If how many times the movie has been delayed and all of the issues that keep plaguing production aren’t enough to make you cry the film’s rumored budget is bound to do the trick. Guess what Variety reports the rumored budget for the movie will be? Did you guess less than $100 million because I certainly wouldn’t have.
An optimistic person would suggest this is Marvel simply pulling back on their spending and focusing on trying to tell good stories — Iron Man only had a budget of $140 million and it essentially launched the MCU, right? That optimistic person lacks the context for just how much chaos is rumored to be taking place behind the scenes at Marvel Studios.
Just ignoring the fact that Marvel seemed to be considering dropping Jonathon Majors even before his ongoing controversy began, it seems not even the director of The Marvels has faith in what is supposed to be the next big blockbuster for the MCU. That movie at least at least had a budget of $250 million but Nia DaCosta still reportedly abandoned the movie in post production to instead go work on her next film, a serious red flag that can’t be ignored. Oh yeah, and did I mention that Marvel floated the “brilliant” idea to not even have Blade be the main star in his own film?
To give Marvel a bit of credit, Oscar-nominated writer Michael Green has been brought on to work on the script for the film and he did make movie magic with Logan on a budget of $97 million. But it’s hard to feel like Marvel has faith in Blade when even that crummy spin-off of Jim Carry’s Bruce Almighty — that I’m positive you’ll be searching the name of after reading this because you can’t even remember the title — had a $175 million budget.
When even fans are questioning if it’s actually worth bringing Blade back, it’s reasonable to speculate that the studio just doesn’t care enough about the movie but doesn’t want the scandal of simply cancelling it and using it as a tax write-off like Warner Brothers did with Batgirl.
Blade is currently set to release in 2025, if it ever sees the light of day at all.
