Way back in the summer of 2019, Marvel Studios announced that Oscar winner Mahershala Ali had been cast to play Blade in the MCU. Now, his debut movie is finally starting to come together. It’s been given a cool-sounding new title – Blade, the Vampire Slayer – and the script is being written by Stacy Osei-Kuffour, whose last foray into superhero fiction was HBO’s acclaimed Watchmen miniseries.
In addition to being credited as a story editor on all nine episodes of Watchmen, Osei-Kuffour got a “written by” credit on “An Almost Religious Awe.” This was one of the most crucial episodes in Angela Abar’s character arc, as it followed the aftermath of her Nostalgia trip and filled in the mysteries of her childhood in Vietnam. Outside of her work on Watchmen, Osei-Kuffour is an accomplished playwright and has also worked on Amazon’s Hunters and HBO’s Run, as well as writing the season 1 episode “Anna Ishii-Peters” for PEN15, one of the show’s best installments.
Choosing Osei-Kuffour for the job came at the end of a long search conducted by Marvel with the involvement of Ali himself. The studio was reportedly only looking at Black writers to find the perfect candidate to tell Blade’s story, after the whole Wesley Snipes trilogy was penned by the white David S. Goyer. Osei-Kuffour will be the first Black woman to write a Marvel movie, while Captain Marvel 2’s Nia DaCosta is set to become the first Black woman to direct a Marvel movie. Marvel is certainly making good on its promise to improve the MCU’s inclusivity (Valkyrie will be seeking a queen in Thor: Love and Thunder and Eternals will feature the MCU’s first deaf superhero and first openly gay superhero, too).
Now that Marvel has found a writer for Blade, the Vampire Slayer, their next job is to find a director. Executives are planning to work with Osei-Kuffour in selecting a filmmaker to sit in the director’s chair for their new Blade movie. Nothing is known about the plot of the movie, except that it’s not related to the previous Snipes movies and won’t be arriving until Phase Five of the MCU. Phase Four only just kicked off with WandaVision, so Blade could be a while away.
While some fans are disappointed that Marvel isn’t bringing back Snipes – who said a bunch of times that he was willing to return to the role – Ali will surely make a terrific Blade. Not only did he win Best Supporting Actor Oscars for Moonlight and Green Book, proving he’s more than capable of handling the nuances of Blade’s grief over losing his mother and his resulting prejudice against vampires, he also demonstrated in Alita: Battle Angel that he looks awesome in sunglasses.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter