Posted in: Marvel Studios, Movies | Tagged: blade, Blade reboot, mahershala ali, marvel, Marvel Studios

Blade Reportedly Has Its Budget Slashed To Less Than $100 Million

2023 has been a year of underwhelming critical and commericial projects for Marvel Studios. Blade reportedly has had its budget slashed to less than $100 million.

2023 has not been kind of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. As the early numbers for The Marvels start to come in, people at the studio are getting more and more worried that something is very wrong at the studio that everyone once thought was too big to fail. There was always a chance that Marvel would slow down after Avengers: Endgame. However, with the pivot to streaming and making so much content for people to keep up, the strategy seemed to flood the market with shows and movies regardless of quality. And while there are plenty of people who will love Marvel no matter what they put out, people behind the scenes are not unaware of how unhappy people are and just how bad some of the critical reception has been. It's starting to affect other movies that were announced and maybe even being worked on by Marvel Mega Boss Kevin Feige tries to fix things behind the scenes. One of those projects is Blade, which has been troubled, to say the least, and according to Variety, that is seen in the budget of this film.

One would think Blade wouldn't be that hard to figure out considering that the first film, which came out in August 1998, a little over a year after the June 1997 release of Batman & Robin that everyone claimed killed the genre entirely, is part of the 1-2-3 punch that has lead to the Marvel becoming the massive juggernaut that it is today. That film doing well, along with X-Men in 2000 and Spider-Man in 2002, were the three pillars that started this entire thing. So why is this reboot with Mahershala Ali such an issue? Variety notes the film has gone through "at least five writers, two directors, and one shutdown six weeks before production," and those are just the people we know of. There are probably more that we don't know of. The report even cites a "narrative led by women and filled with life lessons. Blade was relegated to the fourth lead, a bizarre idea considering that the studio had two-time Oscar winner Ali on board." It sounds like someone might have lost the plot in multiple different ways over at Blade.

So, Feige brought on Michael Green to work on yet another script and did something that some people will see as a bad thing but is actually a very positive step; they want to make the film for less than $100 million. The budgets of the Marvel movies are why the studio is in such trouble right now. If these movies didn't need to clear half a billion or more to even get in the green, projects that weren't very good might have stood a chance to at least break even. The bloated budgets of the Marvel Cinematic Universe needed to be slashed, and it is a good thing that Feige is stepping up to do just that. If Blade is indeed made for that smaller budget and comes out in 2025 and is critically and commercially well received? Well, we can hope that figuring out how to make these movies without breaking the bank becomes the norm.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!