Phil Spencer has shared a small update on Marvel’s Blade.
He shared this statement on Meta’s micro-blogging platform, Threads:
“Congrats to Arkane on the studio’s 25th anniversary. Loved catching up and seeing your progress on Blade.”
Arkane had that celebration in the middle of this month, and to mark the occasion, art director Sébastien Mitton made a digital painting that featured the protagonists of Arkane’s games. That painting included Blade himself, reminding fans that the studio’s next foray into a pop culture license is going to be huge.
Now, it may seem that this was a pretty random update, but Spencer and Microsoft in general may have felt a need to share this update.
And that would be because of the turmoil that seems to be going on with their licensee Marvel Studios, in relation to their live-action Blade movie. As reported by Deadline, the Mahershala Ali feature that was announced in 2019 has been removed from the company’s 2025 lineup.
That film has had reported production woes in the whole time it had been in production. We at least know that the film has added and lost two directors in a row already, in Bassam Tariq and Tann Demange, respectively.
The rumor mill is filled with sordid stories of Ali politicking and multiple false starts, but we won’t run those down for you here. We will acknowledge that there is talk that Wesley Snipes might be brought in to play the character in the MCU again, following a well-received cameo in the recent Deadpool & Wolverine.
Regardless of how the film project, and Blade’s future in the MCU, will play out, Arkane and Microsoft definitely wanted to let fans know that they are deep into production of their Blade project, and they are well on their way to getting it across the finish line.
It’s a certainly strange situation, as a mirror image of how the Marvel’s Avengers and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy games published by Square Enix failed to capitalize on the success of the movies that they were based on.
Now, it looks like Marvel is going to get the lesson on how to make a proper Blade project from the video game company, instead of the other way around. Of course, we do want both the Blade movie and video game to turn out well, but as things stand, it’s the video game that fans of the Daywalker has to look forward to.
