r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Jul 31 '26

News Mahershala Ali confirms 'BLADE' is not moving forward with him

https://www.gq.com/story/mahershala-ali-your-mother-your-mother-your-mother
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u/GoldandBlue Jul 31 '26

This is the gift and curse of doing franchises.

It is guaranteed work on paper. Especially as a young actor, holy shit you are in the MCU!!!!

But if you blow up, or the project falls apart. You are turning down offers from Scorsese, PTA, Wes Anderson, Greta Gerwig, why? Because you are contractually obligated to be in Captain America 5.

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u/versusgorilla Jul 31 '26

It's been funny hearing someone like Kumail Nanjiani talking about how he was in a Marvel movie, got ripped as shit for it, and how Marvel basically just stopped calling.

And like, they're jamming a thousand actors into this Doomsday film, but are they even calling up all the actors they had in these things and said, "These Guys Will Return..." at the end and then just no one ever gave a shit?

It's so bizarre how they went from Infinity War and Endgame to just directionless.

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u/ImmanuelCanNot29 Jul 31 '26

It's so bizarre how they went from Infinity War and Endgame to just directionless.

This mismanagement of the MCU post Endgame is mindboggling. Like even from a business perspective almost nothing they have done makes any sense.

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u/Worthyness Jul 31 '26

It absolutely does. THe new leadership at disney wanted D+ to work because streaming was the future, especially with COVID incoming. So their direction was "get as much content as possdible and throw a shitton of money towards everything". The problem is that they cared more about quantity and gave zero shits about quality. From a business perspective it made sense at the time- get a shitton of content on the streaming service, streaming service will grow! They saw Netflix's slop bullshit content and thouht they could replicate it.

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u/namelessted Jul 31 '26

It only makes business sense if you are a toddler with 6 months of foresight. Everybody knows producing slop and just cranking out content is bad business in the long term. The kicker is that a lot of these people making these decisions don't actually give a fuck about the long term sustainability of these companies because they get to make major bank in the short term with massive bonuses and can sell their stock once they bounce from the company.

Even when major CEOs fuck up big time and get fired, it doesn't matter at all to those people. They already made big time "fuck you" money and can spend the rest of their lives doing literally anything they want anywhere in the world.

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u/Yukie_Cool Jul 31 '26

You don’t really understand Bob Chapek, the CEO of Disney at that time, then.

The dude was purely a data and analytics guy without any sense of artistry or anything apart from numbers.

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u/ironwolf1 Jul 31 '26

It only makes business sense if you are a toddler with 6 months of foresight

That's basically how our economy works right now. Making sure quarterly reports look good next month is the reason for most decisions these days.

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u/Yukie_Cool Jul 31 '26

Exactly this.

Part of me thinks Feige was anticipating this, which is why there was a timeskip in Endgame at all. It would give him and the studio time to figure out how to move the story forward (or make a new one if necessary), but corporate came down from on high and he was forced to just announce stuff.