BLADE Director Bassam Tariq Reveals What He Learned From His Troubled Marvel Experience

Marvel Studios’ Blademay never have made it into production with Mahershala Ali, but former director Bassam Tariq still walked away from the experience with a few lessons that have changed the way he makes movies.

Tariq recently reflected on his time developing the MCU reboot and, despite all the problems the project faced, he found some value in working within the Marvel machine. In particular, his experience with Kevin Feige changed the way he thinks about scale, audiences, and finding ways to make a movie better.

While promoting his latest film, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, Tariq was asked by ComingSoon about the positives he took from working on Blade. He explained:

“Kevin Feige taught me how to think big. I think for all of the things that people throw at them, the guy is phenomenal at, ‘Okay, how do we keep upping the ante?’ And I kept asking – or they call it ‘plussing.’ I think that was the term that they would use. So I think a part of me was also thinking similarly, ‘How do we do that?’”

That Marvel idea of “plussing,” constantly looking for another way to improve what’s already there, stuck with Tariq. He also came away with a greater appreciation for testing a movie with audiences and actually using their reactions to shape the finished film.

Tariq continued: “The other plus, or the other thing that I took, was really audience and listening and hearing the audience. Whereas their testing has to be so careful because they have to keep everything so secretive, I was able to really test my movie with audiences and to really see where I needed to cut or where I needed to explain a little bit more, and how to make sure that the fights would land better and all these other things.”

It’s interesting to hear what Tariq carried forward from a movie that ultimately never came together. Rather than treating the experience as lost time, he took some of Marvel Studios’ filmmaking practices and applied them to his own work, where he had more freedom to put a movie in front of audiences and respond to what worked and what didn’t.

The journey of Marvel’s Blade has been a rough one. Ali was announced as Marvel’s new Daywalker back in 2019, instantly making the reboot one of the more intriguing projects on the studio’s slate.

Tariq came aboard as director in 2021, but exited the following year as production delays continued to hit the film. Marvel kept developing Blade after his departure, with the project going through more changes as the studio tried to figure out the right direction for Ali’s take on the vampire hunter.

By July 2026, Ali confirmed that the movie was no longer moving forward. Marvel Studios currently has no plans to put Blade into production, and we don’t know what the future holds for the character.

It’s a frustrating ending for a Marvel movie that spent years trying to find its footing, especially considering how much potential there was in seeing Ali take on Blade. Marvel shat the bed with this one.

At least Tariq managed to pull something useful out of the experience, and those lessons are now finding their way into the movies he actually gets to make.