The Never-ending ‘Blade’ Delay Led to a Major Change to “Marvel Zombies’
While fans will have to continue to wait to see if Mahershala Ali ever makes his MCU debut as Blade, the Daywalker will soon make an appearance in Marvel Zombies.
A spinoff of What If…? and Marvel’s first TV-MA cartoon, Marvel Zombies will push boundaries and take the Marvel Universe into a dark place.
Ahead of Marvel Zombies’ debut, a new version of Blade has been heavily featured. Needless to say, fans are excited.
Creating a New Blade
As it turned out, the character was created with the assumption that Ali’s Blade would have already made his MCU debut.
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Chelsea Lauren/Variety/Shutterstock (10341985al)
Mahershala Ali. Marvel Studios panel, Comic-Con International, San Diego, USA – 20 Jul 2019
“We felt like Blade was gonna be really exciting to put on screen, and we never thought that we would come out before the live-action Blade,” Marvel’s head of animation Brad Winderbaum explained to Comicbook.
“It was always designed to be after. But we knew that we’d be in concurrent development. Sometimes when you’re chasing live-action like that, if they pivot, and you don’t pivot in the same way, you get stuck because animation needs a lot more lead time.”
To differentiate the animated Blade from his live-action counterpart, the Marvel Zombies team decided to put an interesting spin on the character.
Photo: Marvel
“Making him the Fist of Konshu freed us up in a lot of ways. Because he has now become a new character with lore that we were creating for him. That let us kind of be more free and less tethered to the live action plans.”
The Daywalker’s Debut
With the live-action Blade still stuck in developmental hell, Marvel Zombies will be the iconic anti-heroes’ MCU debut (outside of Wesley Snipes’ appearance in Deadpool & Wolverine).
Unfortunately, the animated version of Blade will be voiced by Todd Williams.
Source: Marvel
Nevertheless, fans are rightly excited to finally see Blade suit up again.
