Marvel’s Blade has been put on hold

Though Marvel’s been hyping up its new Blade feature for quite some time, the studio’s now pumping brakes on the production as it looks for a new director and takes another crack at getting the story just right.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Marvel has shut down production on Blade entirely in Atlanta following former director Bassam Tariq’s move to step back from the project last month. While the studio hopes to start production back up early next year after finding a new director, Marvel’s also reportedly working to “further [develop]” Blade as a whole, suggesting that there’s a significant amount of work to be done before the movie can actually get going again. While these sorts of delays tend not to bode well, Blade is in the interesting position of being one of Marvel’s most recognizable properties and coming to the MCU just as Marvel’s begun to put more supernatural, horror-focused parts of its IP in the spotlight.

It still isn’t all that clear what the studio wants to do with the character or how it wants to position him going forward, so slowing down to… figure those things out might not be the worst development in Blade’s journey to theaters. But fans eager to see the daywalker on the big screen are probably going to have to wait a bit longer, as it doesn’t seem likely that Blade will be in theaters on November 3rd, 2023, the way Marvel intended.