Marvel first announced that it was making a new movie about Blade, the half-vampire vampire hunter played by Wesley Snipes in a trilogy of movies released between 1998 and 2004, in 2019, when it was still flinging spaghetti against the wall and hoping enough stuck to make people happy. Five years later, Blade has become a poster child for the discombobulation of our current Marvel era. It's been delayed multiple times and cycled through a number of directors, including Bassam Tariq and Yann Demange. Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali is still attached as the title character and Mia Goth is playing the supervillain Lilith, but at this rate who knows if we'll actually ever see them onscreen?
That question is coming up again now that Disney has bumped Blade from its latest release date of November 7, 2025, according to Deadline. The movie isn't on the studio's schedule at all anymore, although Disney has secured three new placeholder dates for projects unknown: February 18, 2028, May 5, 2028 and November 10, 2028. Maybe Blade is set for one of those...until it gets bumped again, anyway.
Disney isn't leaving fans high and dry, though. Instead of treating them to a new Blade movie on November 7, 2025, it's giving that time slot to Predator: Badlands, a new Predator film directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who helmed the critically successful Predator film Prey a couple years back. That movie was only ever released on Hulu, but was good enough to be shown in theaters. It's nice to see that the follow-up will get a theatrical release.
Prey was set in the 1700s; the big-game hunting space alien known as the Predator squared off with Native Americans from the Comanche tribe. Although we don't know everything, it sounds like Predator: Badlands will take things into modern times or even the future, and could star Elle Fanning as twin sisters who "pursue divergent paths and missions." Maybe one wants to fight the Predator and one thinks he's pretty cool, actually.
There's also talk of a direct sequel to Prey, but let's take on one thing at a time. As for Marvel, they still have a heavy slate of movies planned for 2025 even without Blade: at the moment, Captain America: Brave New World, Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps are all scheduled to come out next year.
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