Mahershala Ali won’t be Marvel‘s Blade.

The two-time Oscar winner confirmed to GQ his reboot of the iconic vampire slayer isn’t moving forward, and he made it clear he thinks that Marvel dropped the ball.

“I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not,” Ali said in the new interview. “For whatever reason, that project is not for me. If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on … Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie … But I feel ready to move on from the Blade questions. Those questions are for them. They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.”

The comments follow Marvel’s boss Kevin Feige telling the Happy Sad Confused podcast that he was distressed about the company’s inability to get the project going.

“I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala,” the executive said.

Marvel originally announced a Blade movie starring Ali in 2019. The company brought aboard Bassam Tariq to direct, but he left the film in 2022, just two months before the project was to begin shooting. Ali and Tariq have now re-teamed for a different project, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

Tariq tells GQ that Ali actually did training as Blade during pre-production.

“Mahershala is an athlete, and I saw the way he uses a sword on Blade,” the director said. “The first time he was doing sword practice on Blade, the stuff coming back was incredible

“As a former athlete, I’ve dreamed of doing my own stunts,” Ali added. “I was very excited to do stunts in Blade and trained for a long time for that, so it was a huge relief to get to put that work to use [in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother] … When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both, and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me. And I was able to use those skills that I had been working on for over a year training for Blade. In that way, I feel creatively redeemed on some level.”

Ali previously won best supporting actor Oscars for Moonlight (2016) and Green Book (2018).

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is an upcoming Amazon MGM Studios action film. The premise: “Following the death of his wife, a devoutly religious hitman (Ali) embarks on a desperate journey across Houston to protect his children, confronting the forces closing in around him – and the beliefs threatening to unravel within.” The film will have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. 

EXCLUSIVE: Netflix is putting together its next reality ensemble.

The streamer is behind The Leftovers (w/t) from Jersey Shore producer SallyAnn Salsano. The series will be filmed across New Jersey and features a group of lifelong friends from the Garden State.

The project will follow this group, which is at a crossroads as they reunite to prepare for the first wedding in their friend group. With an international wedding on the horizon, old friendships are tested, relationships evolve, and everyone is forced to confront what growing up really means. Who’s going to grow up? And who’s going to be leftover?

The Leftovers is currently in “active and ongoing development” at the streamer but is one of a number of new unscripted shows that are expected to be greenlit.

The show is produced by Salsano’s 495 Productions, the company behind MTV’s long-running Jersey Shore franchise, and she will exec produce. It previously had the working title A Shore Thing, which was also the name of a novel by Jersey Shore star Nicole ‘Snooki’ Polizzi.

Despite the similarities with Jersey Shore, this is a new project and unrelated to the Seaside Heights-set show, which starred the likes of Snooki, Pauly D, JWoww, Mike ‘The Situation’ Sorrentino, Sammi Giancola, Ronnie Ortiz-Magro and Vinny Guadagnino.

That show ran for six seasons on MTV between 2009 and 2012 with the cast regrouping for Jersey Shore: Family Vacation, which premiered on MTV in 2018. The show ran for eight seasons, ending earlier this year with an 18-episode season.

495 Productions was also behind Fox reality competition series The Snake, which was hosted by Jim Jeffries and ran for one season last year, VH1’s Martha and Snoop’s Potluck Dinner and a host of Jersey Shore spinoffs from Double Shot at Love to Floribama Shore and Buckhead Shore.

It is also producing Amazon’s upcoming series Reality Retreat, which features alum from shows including The Real Housewives, Selling Sunset, Vanderpump Rules and The Chrisleys.

The Leftovers marks Netflix’s latest foray into the reality ensemble genre; earlier this year it launched Calabasas Confidential and in December premiered Members Only: Palm Beach.

Frank Miller is full of praise for Spider-Man: Brand New Day.

The comics icon took to Instagram to share his feelings about Sony’s latest Tom Holland adventure, calling the film, “The most Ditko movie yet and with my Hand in it for all to celebrate. This fan’s dream come true. Tom Holland is my forever Spider-Man as romantic as he is heroic. Congratulations to Destin and the whole team.”

“The most Ditko movie yet” refers to Steve Ditko, who co-created the Spider-Man character with Stan Lee and drew the early comics. Ditko’s Spider-Man was a more grounded, street-level take on the character, something critics are saying about Brand New Day as well. His reference to his ‘Hand’ in it likely refers to The Hand — a ninja organization that appears in Brand New Day and was created by Miller during his Daredevil run.

Miller, who famously wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Year One for DC, has sometimes been a tough critic of comic book movies over the years. In 2014, Playboy asked Miller about the “lousy” movie adaptations of Daredevil and Elektra. “When people come out with movies about characters I’ve worked on, I always hate them,” Miller said. “I have my own ideas about what the characters are like. I mean, I can’t watch a Batman movie. I’ve seen pieces of them, but I generally think, No, that’s not him. And I walk out of the theater before it’s over.”

When asked if that includes Christopher Nolan’s acclaimed Batman trilogy, Miller replied, “It includes all of them. I’m not condemning what he does. I don’t even understand it, except that he seems to think he owns the title Dark Knight. He’s about 20 years too late for that.”

Miller added during a Reddit AMA, “They could do Citizen Kane and I would find something wrong with it.”

Longtime Spider-Man comic book writer, J. Michael Straczynski, also had some praise for Brand New Day, writing on X: “To be clear I’ve enjoyed all the Spider-Man movies. But for my money, this latest iteration feels most authentically Peter, and Spider-Man. So many comic movies have fallen into MacGuffin plots, looking for the code, the stone, the box, the sword…this one is all about what William Faulkner called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself.’ It’s a very human story, emotional without being slow or dull or self-indulgent. It feels like stepping into a really good Spidey comic. Well done to all concerned (and even those unconcerned).”

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters and is tracking toward a massive box office opening, estimated to reach around $465 million globally.