Marvel puts Blade movie on hold, delays everything else

It’s another “Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good” day at Marvel HQ, with the Mahershala Ali-starring Blade movie officially being put on pause and pretty much every other big movie on the slate getting pushed back—including some we don’t know about yet. Is this the end of Marvel’s box office dominance? No, we’ll just have to wait slightly longer to see our favorite superhero friends… and more than slightly longer in at least one case.

Speaking of, let’s start with the Daywalker: Director Bassam Tariq dropped out of the project at the end of September, with the official explanation from Marvel being “continued shifts in our production schedule” that left Tariq unable to stay on as director (uh huh, sure). No new director has been named, but The Hollywood Reporter says that the movie is now being put on hold so Marvel can a new filmmaker while it “further develops” the project. The Hollywood Reporter story notes that the movie has already gone through “several rounds of script rewrites,” so this pause seems to suggest that there are bigger issues than the loss of the director (which is usually a big tip-off that there are issues anyway).

Blade was originally set to come out on November 3, 2023, but after this pause it has been bumped way back to September 6, 2024 (that’s nearly a whole year, if you don’t have a calendar handy). If you do have a calendar handy, you may recognize that date as the one from Ryan Reynolds’ recent Deadpool 3 teases, and since Marvel still isn’t unhinged enough to release two movies on the same day, it has now also bumped Deadpool 3 to November 8, 2024. That was the original release date for Fantastic Four, so it has now been moved to February 14, 2025 (how very like Reed Richards to spend Valentine’s Day working rather than doing something nice for his wife).

Finally, Avengers: Secret Wars has been moved from November 7, 2025, to May 5, 2026, with its old date now being claimed by an “untitled Marvel pic” (as Deadline puts it). There’s also another untitled movie that has been removed from the schedule entirely after originally being set for May of 2026, which is probably bad news for fans of…something. Let’s just assume it’s The X-Men, since it’ll be a long time before we find out one way or the other.