Delroy Lindo Confirms MCU's 'Blade' Is a S--- Show

I would love to sit here and tell you how excellent Marvel’s take on Blade, starring Mahershala Ali, is. They announced it in 2019. Surely, they took a slam-dunk idea like that and turned it into cinematic gold that set imaginations on fire and paved the way for a quickly greenlit sequel. It’s a movie about a cool Black man killing vampires with a sword. It’s a proven formula. How could they screw that up? The answer: let it get out of control. It sounds like that’s exactly what happened.

This last weekend saw the release of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. It’s an original film about Black people dealing with vampires in the Jim Crow-era South. Michael B. Jordan plays twins. I know almost nothing else about the movie aside from that, because I’ve planned on seeing it since it was announced (going Thursday). I love Ryan Coogler and have yet to have a bad time seeing one of his movies in theaters. So, I wanted to go into this movie cold. But I do know a few more things about it.

I think (at least) that Ryan Coogler had seen the mess that was Marvel trying to develop a Blade movie and decided to tell his own story. There was an article that stated as much last year (or maybe the year before). But, I just tried to search for it and was met with potential spoilers for the movie, and I will not abide by that! So, I’m, like, pretty sure that Coogler was inspired by Marvel’s lack of momentum on Blade. If that is true, it is an embarrassing indictment, especially given Sinners’ success. What I do know for sure is that Delroy Lindo, who was supposed to be in Blade, is in Sinners.

The legendary actor appears in Sinners and, I assume, is fantastic in it. Everything he’s done until this point supports that assumption. He was asked about the MCU’s attempt to make a vampire film, and he seems as disappointed as the rest of us. “When Marvel came to me, they seemed to be really interested in my input,” he explained to Entertainment Weekly. “And in the various conversations I had with producers, the writer, the director at the time, it was all leading into being very inclusive. It was really exciting conceptually, but it was also exciting in terms of the character that was going to form. And then, for whatever reason, it just went off the rails.”

Every update about Blade’s development is disappointing, but this one hits extra hard. Lindo is an incredible actor. We can safely assume that if he’s involved in the process, he’ll give something great. Instead, he becomes another element that should have made the movie successful, simply cast aside (Lindo is no longer involved in the film).

Delroy also noted that his character was inspired by political activist Marcus Garvey. “I’m not saying that it would’ve been an out-and-out Garvey-ite. Not that, but just in terms of how this man’s philosophy, his ethos and what was driving him. He was a character who had, very similar to Sinners, created a community, a Black community,” Lindo noted. “He was a character who was the head of this community.” Great. Real influence and substance applied to an MCU movie, only to be dashed away.

Every update about this film is a stone-cold bummer. At least we have Sinners. Maybe it will start a positive trend (*looks at article about Hollywood execs negatively freaking out over its success*). Goddammit.