There’s been a lot of Marvel news across our final weekend and Alasdair’s here with the first in a two part round up…

Let’s start with Blade. Which has stopped. It’s now been confirmed by everyone involved that what may have been the easiest layup shot in Marvel history has been well and truly fumbled. Originally announced in 2019, Blade was to have starred Mahershala Ali and been directed by Bassam Tariq. By 2022 it got incredibly close to being ready to go before Tariq left due to creative differences. Purportedly set in the 1920s, the movie had every asset in place. So much so that several staff and cast including legendary costume designer Ruth E. Carter and actor Delroy Lindo moved over to Ryan Coogler’s future Oscar winner, Sinners. Yann Demange was brought in to replace Tariq but dropped out two years later. Ali, a break out in the way more fun than expected Jurassic World Dominion, was asked about Blade on the red carpet and said simply ‘Tell them, I’m ready.’ And he was too. While we aren’t getting Blade, Ali has made Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother with Tariq, and the year’s worth of sword training he did seems to be very much on display.

Then, in the run up to SDCC, Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios President, went on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and ripped the band aid off. ‘“I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala…We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique… It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on ‘Blade,’ and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

In the immortal words of She-Hulk, whatever, Kevin.

Feige also drives around the block to blame the Disney+ TV shows for Marvel ‘over expanding’. Given how many of those shows had interesting things to say (WandaVision and, featured non-white male leads (Falcon, She-Hulk, Wanda Maximoff, Riri Wiliams, Kamala Khan, Simon Wiliams, Nick Fury, and more) it’s a staggeringly tone-deaf thing to say even before you get to two vital points,

Firstly, there is a blueprint for making good Blade movies. They’re called the Blade movies. Even Blade Trinity (and the production of that was a RIDE) has an incredibly confident central core embodied not just by Snipes but by a grungy, horror-tinged world that’s enormously good fun to spend three movies in. The TV version was similarly good fun. It’s not even the ‘Just have him wear a cool trenchcoat and stab vampires’ element either those movies are legitimate horror films with legitimate talent on both sides of the counter. It’s genuinely not hard. Except, apparently, for Marvel.

 

Secondly, there’s  the Wonder Man issue. Wonder Man is Marvel’s wonderful Wes Anderson-esque look at Hollywood and super heroics through the friendship between a jobbing actor and a former (sort of) terrorist? It’s great! Six episodes of incredibly sweet, funny, weird television. The entire cast are great but leading man Yahya Abdul Mateen II an Emmy nomination is especially great and is up for an Emmy for his work in it. Best thing Marvel have done in years! Renewed for season 2!

It’s cancelled now.

*pinches bridge of nose so very, very hard*

Initial word was that this was a scheduling issue. Then, with the galactic success of Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton of the show, there was an assumption this was a scheduling issue. Then, people assumed Simon and Trevor would be showing up in a movie. None of that, according to showrunner and co-creator Andrew Guest, is the case.

“Just want to say I’ve been listening,” Guest said. “I appreciate you all. I feel how you all feel, and I just want to clear up when I can here. This is not a marketing stunt. There is no movie in the works, and [Destin Daniel Cretton’s] schedule and no one’s schedule was an issue. Yahya [Abdul Mateen II], Destin, Sir Ben [Kingsley] and I all loved making this show. All felt passionately about continuing to do it and were eager to. Contracts were signed; schedules were cleared… the writers’ room was supposed to start this month. The production was supposed to begin early next year, and there was a decision made internally between Disney and Marvel that this didn’t make sense for them, even though a few months ago it did. And that’s essentially all I really know.”

This is the platonic ideal of a terrible look. Marvel pulling one beloved POC character from development is bad. Marvel following that by taking a POC show that earned massive acclaim and was renewed and deciding to un-renew it feels like a pattern. Especially when you consider how long the show was on the shelf, how badly Ironheart was promoted and how we’ve seen nothing of Kamala Khan since The Marvels. This no longer looks entirely unfortunate. It starts to look like choices, and choices that kowtow to the stupidest, loudest, most bigoted voices in fandom and production. It feels depressingly analogous to the video game industry where games can win awards, be massive successes and everyone involved will be laid off in the endless quest to make Line Go Up.

And when things get like this then you find yourself looking for patterns and the more you look the more you see. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was the second highest grossing movie of 2021. A sequel was announced. Five years later, we’ve got nothing, but we will see Shang-Chi presumably jobbing to Gambit in Doomsday, in what it seems safe to assume is the only major scene they’ll both get. Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson got one movie, over produced into oblivion, before being overshadowed by the return of Steve Rogers in Doomsday. The apparent attempt to reboot Blade as the leader of the Midnight Suns horror heroes team never went anywhere, although the Ryan Gosling fronted Ghost Rider sure seems to be.

In fairness, Marvel has had a season in Hell, one the planet has partially shared. It’s impossible not to note Blade was announced right before Covid. Six years post outbreak, Covid is still present, the global political climate is more unstable than it’s ever been, Hollywood was shut down by an extended and entirely justifiable strike and the lynchpin talent for Marvel’s next two phases assaulted his girlfriend. Marvel get some grace for this, but that grace doesn’t come close to justifying a string of choices that feels cowardly at best and deeply toxic and prejudiced at worst. Feige can shrug and feel bad all he wants but actions speak louder than spin. Right now it sure looks like Marvel have made a choice to be less diverse, less interesting, more cowardly and more cynical. But I’ve been here 1200 words, so I’ll have to talk about those last two in the next piece…

 

 

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