Marvel Canceled Wonder Man and Finally Drove Mahershala Ali Away From Blade

Marvel Studios is having one hell of a week.

Disney canceled Wonder Man after previously renewing it for a second season, and Mahershala Ali finally confirmed what most of us already suspected: his version of Blade is dead.

Marvel canceled something that worked and failed to make something it spent seven years promising us. That’s impressive, even for them.

I loved Wonder Man. It was one of the most original and genuinely enjoyable things Marvel has put on Disney+.

It wasn’t another show about a glowing thing in the sky or a villain who was secretly an evil version of the hero. It was a smaller, character-driven story about friendship, acting and two broken people trying to figure out what they were supposed to do next.

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II was excellent as Simon Williams, but the relationship between Simon and Trevor Slattery was what made the show work. Ben Kingsley took a character who started as a punchline in Iron Man 3 and somehow helped turn him into the emotional center of one of Marvel’s best shows.

The first season ended with Simon breaking Trevor out of a Department of Damage Control prison, leaving both characters as wanted fugitives and giving the second season a completely different situation to explore.

I was excited to see where that story went. Disney apparently wasn’t, I guess.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day had just reminded everyone why we fell in love with Marvel movies in the first place. That made the timing even stranger: one part of Marvel was showing how high the MCU can still climb while another was canceling a story I wanted more of.

Wonder Man premiered in January, earned strong reviews and received a second-season renewal in March. It currently holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes, while Abdul-Mateen earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series.

Abdul-Mateen responded to the cancellation by thanking everyone who watched, enjoyed and supported the series.

“The show worked. And that’s my favorite thing about it.”

He then signed off with one final reminder:

“See you at the EMMYS.”

He’s right. Whatever numbers Disney was looking at behind the scenes, the show itself worked. The audience that found it loved it, the critics praised it and its lead actor earned an Emmy nomination. That’s a hell of a strange time to decide there shouldn’t be any more of it.

Four months after announcing the renewal, Disney pulled the plug. According to the report, a second-season writers’ room was never opened, and the show’s writers have now been released to pursue other projects.

That’s the part that pisses me off.

Canceling an expensive show that nobody watched is one thing. Canceling a show after publicly renewing it tells the audience that investing in any Marvel series is a waste of time. How many one-and-dones are they going to give us now?

Why should anyone become attached to these characters or their stories when Disney can announce another season, leave the first one sitting on a cliffhanger and then change its mind before anyone writes a single episode?

Disney didn’t release official viewership figures, and the show reportedly appeared in Nielsen’s streaming Top 10 only once before disappearing the following week. That may have played a part in the decision, but it doesn’t make the cancellation any less disappointing for those of us who actually watched and loved it.

Marvel spent years flooding Disney+ with shows that felt like homework. Then it finally made something different, something that stood on its own and didn’t require a flowchart explaining which movies and shows you needed to watch first.

So naturally, the smart move is to kill the goddamn thing.

Now I’m looking at you, Blade.

Marvel announced Mahershala Ali as its new Daywalker at San Diego Comic-Con in 2019. He walked onto the stage, put on a Blade hat, and the crowd lost its collective shit.

That was seven years ago. Seven!

Since then, Marvel’s Blade has gone through multiple writers, directors, scripts, production delays and release dates without ever becoming an actual movie. Ali’s only appearance as the character was a voice cameo at the end of Eternals. We never even got to see him.

Now Ali has officially moved on, and he isn’t being particularly vague about why.

“If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it.”

Marvel had him under contract. It had the character, the money and seven years to find a director, approve a script and put the damn cameras somewhere near Mahershala Ali. It still couldn’t get the movie made.

That’s brutal, but really, what else is Ali supposed to think?

Marvel announced one of the best actors working today as one of its coolest characters, then wasted his time until he decided he had better things to do. The craziest part is that Marvel already had proof that audiences still wanted Blade.

Wesley Snipes returned in Deadpool & Wolverine and immediately reminded everyone why he owned the role. Then he looked directly at the audience and said:

“There’s only been one Blade. There’s only ever gonna be one Blade.”

Deadpool stared into the camera because it was supposed to be a joke.

Maybe Wesley Snipes was right. They knew.

Mahershala Ali could’ve made a great Blade. We’ll never know because Marvel Studios somehow couldn’t make a vampire movie starring a two-time Academy Award winner during the seven years it spent producing damn near everything else.

Ali said Marvel had him under contract and possessed the resources to make the movie, but it never followed through. He has now moved on and says questions about why the film collapsed should be directed to Marvel.

In less than 24 hours, Marvel canceled a show I loved and officially lost the star of a movie I’d been waiting years to see. These aren’t exactly the same situation, but they appear to come from the same larger problem.

Marvel still doesn’t know how to follow through.

It’ll announce projects years before they’re ready, promise second seasons before the writers have been called and parade actors across convention stages without knowing whether their movies will ever exist.

Marvel spent the last few years admitting it had made too much and stretched the MCU too thin. The new promise was quality over quantity, which sounded like exactly what needed to happen.

But it feels like the pendulum may have swung a little too far in the other direction.

There’s a difference between becoming more selective and abandoning projects people were already invested in. Wonder Man had strong reviews, an audience waiting for Season 2 and a story that was nowhere near finished. Blade had Mahershala Ali attached for seven years and still couldn’t make it in front of a camera.

Of course, none of us really knows what happened behind the scenes except the people who were actually there. There could be financial, contractual or creative circumstances surrounding both projects that haven’t been made public yet.

I’m sure the complete stories will eventually come out, and they’ll probably be considerably messier than the versions we’re hearing right now.

From the outside, though, it looks like Marvel responded to making too much by becoming afraid to make anything that isn’t guaranteed to be enormous.

Marvel doesn’t need to make everything.

But when Marvel finds something good—or spends seven years promising us something—it should probably stop killing it, especially right after Spider-Man: Brand New Day reminded us how high the MCU can still climb.