Marvel spent seven years failing to make Blade with Mahershala Ali. Ali went and made the movie anyway. It just has a different name, a different studio, and no vampires.
Hours after Ali officially announced he has moved on from Blade, the full GQ profile behind those comments reveals just how much Blade DNA is baked into Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, his September action film at Amazon MGM.
Start with this detail from director Bassam Tariq, who was Marvel’s original Blade director before exiting the project in 2022.
Tariq told GQ that his earliest drafts didn’t even have a name for the lead character. He “just wrote ‘Mahershala.'”
The movie was written for the Blade star from the very first page.
The Sword In The Teaser Was On Purpose
Ali plays Latif, a devout Muslim hitman in Houston whose wife suddenly dies, leaving him to protect a newborn and two other children while he lands on the wrong side of a radical church led by John Cho’s Pastor Hwan Yoon.
The teaser put a sword in Ali’s hand, a shot that plays directly to fans who spent seven years waiting to see him as the Daywalker.
Ali doesn’t dodge that in the interview. “I’m glad we were able to satisfy that and kind of move on,” he said.
The sword work is real, too. Ali trained for over a year for Blade and says this film finally let him put those skills to use, calling it his first true action movie since he usually dies before the action starts, as in Predators and The Hunger Games.
Ali is blunt about the connection. He says the movie only exists because Blade fell apart, which gave Tariq the time and space to write it and bring it back to him, and that using the training left him feeling “creatively redeemed on some level.”
The Ex-Blade Director Takes A Shot At Superhero Box Office
Then there’s the quote Marvel won’t love.
Explaining why the film doesn’t stack fight scene after fight scene, Tariq told GQ that audiences have gotten smart and that the box office shows people are less excited about superhero movies “because we kind of know what’s going to happen.”
That is the guy Marvel hired to direct Blade, and the numbers back him up, with Supergirl‘s theatrical collapse the freshest example.
Ali makes the same point his own way.
He says the film delivers the action you would expect from a big-budget superhero piece, done in what he calls a “mom-and-pop, couple bag of nickels way,” and that the limitations were a feature, not a bug. Given a choice between this and Blade, he’ll take this.
So here is where the whole saga lands.
Marvel’s Blade burned through multiple directors, four script versions by Kevin Feige’s own count, and seven years, and Feige now says he feels like a “gigantic loser” over it.
Amazon MGM gets the finished product of all that development: the trained star, the director, and the sword.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens in theaters September 25.
Watch the trailer:
