Mahershala Ali and Bassam Tariq finally made a movie together. It is not Blade. “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother” had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on Saturday night, five years after Marvel Studios hired Tariq to direct Ali in a vampire hunter film that never got made, and the version of Blade that fell apart is now being described in public for the first time.
What Tariq’s Blade Actually Was
Tariq was hired in 2021 to direct Blade with Ali attached to star. He spent about a year and a half on it and moved his family to Atlanta, where pre-production was well underway. He backed out in 2022 over production delays and stayed on as an executive producer. He has now confirmed that his version of the film was set at least partly in the 1920s, a detail that had never been publicly established.
Ruth E. Carter was his costume designer. When Carter went on to work on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, she brought some of the unused Blade costumes with her, which means a small piece of the movie Marvel never released has already been on screen somewhere else.
On the experience of working inside the studio, Tariq was measured rather than bitter. He said the system was fine and that they were part of it, but that there was always somebody else running the thing. Blade cycled through further changes after he left and eventually collapsed entirely.
The Film They Made Instead
Ali plays Latif, a devout Muslim hitman whose wife dies suddenly, leaving him alone with a teenage daughter, a ten year old son and a newborn. The stash of breast milk his wife left behind is running out and the baby will not take formula, so his search for more sends him across Houston and into the path of Hwan, played by John Cho, the gun-toting leader of an anti-pornography Christian cult. Latif kills with a long blade rather than a gun, which is not a coincidence anyone involved is pretending to miss.
Adia plays the daughter and Jahleel Kamara the son. The cast also includes Tramell Tillman, Abubakr Ali, Laith Nakli, Tiffany Boone and Giancarlo Esposito. Orion Pictures presents the film, a Two and Two Pictures production, with Lucan Toh, Babak Anvari and Tariq producing and Amazon MGM Studios distributing.
The story is Tariq’s own. In 2014, days after his wife gave birth to their first son, she developed a serious infection and went into intensive care. The baby would not take formula, and Tariq spent those days carrying his newborn around New York looking for breast milk while not knowing whether his wife would recover.
He began writing the script during the pandemic, before Blade came along, and had no name for the lead, so he simply typed “Mahershala” in it. The two met for real later, at a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles while Blade was still in development. When Tariq left that project, he used the pause to go back to the script he had already written for a man he had never worked with.
Where That Leaves Marvel
Ali has been increasingly blunt about the project this year, saying at Toronto that he has moved on from Blade entirely. That is a long way from 2019, when his casting was announced onstage at San Diego Comic-Con to one of the loudest receptions of the weekend.
The collapse also sits alongside a run of Marvel projects that did not survive, including Wonder Man, cancelled four months after it was renewed. Marvel has not announced any current plans for Blade.
When To See It
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother opens in select theaters on September 25, with a wider release following in October. Stunt coordinator Adam Hart choreographed the fight sequences, which Ali singled out for praise given how little time the production had for them. Of working opposite the children in the film, Ali said the experience and the part are all a bit of an emotional blur, and that he is still learning about it.
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