Delroy Lindo joins Mahershala Ali in the Blade reboot which Ali is cast as the titular human-vampire hybrid.
Bassam Tariq is directing the feature project from a script Stacy Osei-Kuffour penned. Osei-Kuffour writing the script makes her the first Black woman to pen a Marvel movie.
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Created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, Blade first appeared was in the 1973 comic book The Tomb of Dracula. “Blade” was born as a human-vampire hybrid and has spent his long life seeking to rid the world of vampires like the one that killed his mother. Over the years, he has mastered his own style of fighting monsters of all kinds.
It’s unclear who Lindo will be playing in the Blade reboot but one strong possibility is Jamal Afari, who in the Marvel comics is the man who raised and mentored Blade — a.k.a. Eric Brooks — in the ways of vampire hunting when Eric was young. In the comics, Jamal is Black, but in the 1998 feature adaptation of “Blade” starring Wesley Snipes, the character was renamed Abraham Whistler and cast with white actor Kris Kristofferson.
The 1998 original franchise led by Snipes, was a surprise box office hit for Marvel, earning $131 million against a budget of $45 million budget. It spawned two addition sequels and went on to earn a combined $415 million. The success of Blade helped save the Marvel company that back to 1996 when Marvel was going bankrupt, filing Chapter 11 that year. It also helped pave the way for the future MCU.
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Marvel has not yet announced a release date for “Blade,” but it is expected to debut in the fall of 2023.
Lindo is coming off another critically-acclaimed role in Netflix’s Western epic “The Harder They Fall.” In that movie he plays Bass Reeves, the real-life lawman who was an inspiration for the Lone Ranger. The actor will next appear in Neil Gaiman’s “Anansi Boys” series at Amazon, and he’s set to make his directorial debut with the film “Jabari’s People.”