Director Yann Demange to sink his teeth into Mahershala Ali’s Blade movie

Marvel Studios’ troubled Blade movie, with Mahershala Ali stepping in to play the iconic vampire slayer previously made famous by Wesley Snipes, seems to be back on track—and it happened pretty quickly, all things considered. It was only in September when director Bassam Tariq dropped out of the film, citing some kind of timing issue with the production schedule, which prompted Marvel Studios to put Blade on hold until it could find a new filmmaker to rework the project to their own sensibilities (which then led to a whole bunch of other Marvel movies being delayed in order to accommodate Blade being pushed back by nearly a whole year).

But now, a little more than a month after that, Marvel has hired White Boy Rick and Lovecraft Country director Yann Demange to take over. That comes from Deadline, which says Demange survived “weeks of meetings and pitches” and came up with an idea that Marvel executives “were excited about,” and while we don’t have any details, Deadline’s “insiders” says that the movie is going to be “darker” than the rest of the MCU but that it “won’t be as dark as the previous Blade pics.” Now, the previous Blade pics weren’t especially dark, unless you just count violence as “dark,” but that does probably put a stake in the heart of our dreams of hearing Ali’s Blade call someone a motherfucker. Oh well.

Also, in addition to Demange coming on board, the movie also has a new writer: Michael Starrbury, who worked on When They See Us. Blade, after that previous delay, will be in theaters on September 6, 2024, at which point we’ll hopefully get to see what Ali’s Blade looks like (he previously got a vocal cameo in Eternals, which was, let’s be honest, one of the more inexplicable things in an MCU movie).