Flying Lotus was set to score Marvel’s ‘Blade’ before it was indefinitely delayed

Flying Lotus attends the LA premiere of 'Ash'. CREDIT: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic via Getty Images.

Flying Lotus has revealed he was on board to score Marvel’s Blade reboot, before the project was delayed indefinitely.

The producer, DJ and rapper took to X to share the news. He wrote: “I guess we are so far from it even being a possibility now but. Yeah I was signed on to write music for the new BLADE movie before it fell thru.

“Maybe it’ll come around again but I doubt it. Would have been fun tho”

The original Blade movie came out in 1998, starring Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter. Snipes reprised the role for a cameo in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.

Marvel first announced that it would be rebooting Blade, with Moonlight star and Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali in the lead role, back in 2019 at San Diego Comic-Con.

Since then, the film has faced numerous setbacks – two directors (Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange) came on board and then left the project, and it has cycled through several writers in an attempt to land on a script and make it to production.

Mahershala Ali attends the 2021 AFI Fest Official Screening of Magnolia Pictures' "Swan Song" at TCL Chinese Theatre on November 12, 2021 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Mahershala Ali. Credit: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images

Sinners star Delroy Lindo, who was attached to the new Blade in an as-yet unspecified role, recently said Marvel has been “really interested” in his input for the film before it “went off the rails”.

Costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who also worked on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and was on board for Blade, spoke out about her work on the MCU reboot last week in an interview with Robert Meyer Burnett for the Designing Hollywood podcast.

When asked when she was first approached about Sinners, Carter said: “I was prepping Blade for Marvel. It was a 1920s Blade story, and it got shut down, because of the writers’ strike and the actors’ strike. And so I was just in limbo, having done all this research for a period piece about a vampire, because Blade is a vampire story.”

Wesley Snipes at the 2022 Academy Awards. CREDIT: Gilbert Flores/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images
Wesley Snipes at the 2022 Academy Awards. CREDIT: Gilbert Flores/Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images

Despite Ali saying in December 2023 that he was “sincerely encouraged” by the direction the film was heading in after its most recent creative overhaul, Marvel removed Blade from its planned November 2025 release date late last year, and haven’t announced anything regarding it since.

Elsewhere, Flying Lotus recently directed the sci-fi horror movie Ash, which was released in the US in March. It received mixed reviews from critics, with many appreciating its visual style but finding the narrative lacking.

Ali will next appear in Jurassic World Rebirth, in cinemas July 2 – watch the trailer here.

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