Mahershala Ali "agrees" the collapse of Blade is the "biggest failure" of Kevin Feige's career.

The two-time Oscar winner was unveiled as Marvel's new Blade during a surprise appearance alongside the Marvel Studios president at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019 but the project never got off the ground and he admitted he still has no idea why it fell apart.

He told GQ: "That's a Kevin Feige question. I don't know why it did to this day. I don't know why it didn't happen. I just know that it was Kevin, he said it was the biggest failure of his career and I agree. 100%. He should feel that way."

The 52-year-old star expressed his frustration at spending so much time waiting to start work on Blade, turning down projects and "uprooting" his family to focus on the film.

He said: "I'm saying no to things in that time because they own my schedule basically.

"I spent a year training. Yeah. I trained so hard 'til I blew my knee out.

"I literally moved, uprooted my family. Moved to Atlanta. We're there waiting to go and they just keep pushing it back pushing it back pushing it and we don't…it doesn't happen."

But ultimately, Mahershala learned a valuable lesson from the experience.

He said: "In the end, the failure became a blessing in disguise. It helped me stop waiting for the golden ticket and start building my own path."

Earlier this year, Kevin reflected publicly on the failure to bring Blade to cinemas.

He told the Happy Sad Confused podcast: "I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn't get off the ground with Mahershala."

Marvel first announced the new Blade movie - which was set to follow the late 1990s/early 2000s trilogy featuring Wesley Snipes in the lead role - in 2019, with Bassam Tariq attached to direct.

However, the filmmaker dropped out just two months before shooting was due to begin in September 2022, whilst numerous screenwriters came and went during the development process.

Yann Demange signed up to direct the movie but dropped out himself in June 2024.

Feige revealed last year that the delays to Blade were a result of Marvel's "over-expansion" into Disney+ content, which meant that "quantity trumped quality" for a period.

He said: "We didn't want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique.

"It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, 'Only accept insanely great.' And it wasn't 'insanely great' at the time.

"We didn't feel like we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn't feel confident that we could do that on Blade, and we didn't want to do that to Mahershala and didn't want to do that to us."