Marvel Paid for the Sword Work in Ali’s New Film

Mahershala Ali trained more than a year for Marvel’s Blade, and he says that work paid for the fights in Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother. The 112-minute Amazon MGM thriller had its world premiere in Toronto on September 12. It opens in select U.S. theaters on September 25 and expands in October.

Ali is gracious about the studio that never put him in the coat. The joke still sits in the quote. Marvel paid for a body of sword work it does not own, and the film now carrying that work is the one critics are lining up to praise.

Marvel Paid for a Fight Movie It Does Not Own

The two-time Oscar winner, 52, told a Toronto interviewer that Blade prep started in 2022 with sword work and several martial arts. He blew out a knee, had surgery, then climbed back into the training because he had waited years for a part that asked him to use his body that way. He played basketball at St. Mary’s College of California and had watched other actors disappear into fight camps. Blade looked like that job. Then the job stalled.

When writer-director Bassam Tariq brought him an original script instead, Ali still had that year in his muscle memory. The new film did not have a superhero budget or a long rehearsal calendar. He learned fresh choreography between camera setups. He says the old Marvel hours are why the scenes landed.

It was because of that year that Marvel paid for my training that I was able to execute it in this. So, yeah, they helped pay for our film in that way, whether they wanted to or not. It wasn’t going to go to waste.

Mahershala Ali, speaking in Toronto after the premiere

A separate festival-studio conversation put the same point in plainer terms. Ali said the training ran “a little more than a year,” that they “couldn’t have afforded” to prep this movie on their own dime, and that he is “so grateful that they made a wonderful contribution to our film.” He was not describing a co-production check. He was describing fight camp, paid by a studio whose vampire movie never shot, then spent on a hitman picture released by Amazon MGM Studios and Orion Pictures.

Seven Years Under Contract, Then a Walk-Off

Marvel Studios announced Ali as Blade in 2019 by walking him onto a Hall H stage at San Diego Comic-Con. Ali later counted the attachment at about seven years. Tariq joined to write and direct in 2021. He left in September 2022, about two months before cameras were due to roll, and stayed on as an executive producer. Other directors and writers cycled through. An early release date of November 3, 2023, came and went. Ali even voiced a post-credits tease in 2021’s Eternals. Wesley Snipes, the original screen Blade, turned up instead in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine.

THE BLADE CALENDAR THAT NEVER SHOT

1. July 2019: Marvel puts Ali on the Comic-Con stage as Blade.
2. 2021: Bassam Tariq is hired to write and direct.
3. September 2022: Tariq steps down as director, weeks from a planned start, and remains an executive producer.
4. November 3, 2023: The first public release date passes with no film.
5. 2022 into 2023: Ali trains more than a year in sword work and martial arts, then loses time to a knee surgery.
6. July 2026: Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige says the film never got off the ground with Ali. Later that month Ali says he is done.

In July, Ali closed the door in language that left little wiggle room. “If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it,” he said. He added that Marvel had him under contract and “billions of dollars,” and that “if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.” He asked that further Blade questions go to the studio. “They didn’t want to do it, so they should answer that question.”

In Toronto he doubled down. “I’m done. I’m doing this and anything else moving forward. I’m over that, I’m done with that.”

A Hitman, Three Kids and a Code

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is not a superhero consolation prize with the serial numbers filed off. Ali plays Latif, a devout Muslim contract killer in Houston who will not use a gun and who, after his wife dies, has to mother three children, including a baby who cannot take formula. John Cho plays an unhinged anti-porn evangelist whose people come after him. The title repeats a well-known Islamic teaching in which a man asks the Prophet who most deserves good treatment and is told “your mother” three times before he hears “your father.”

Ali has been in loud movies without ever being the person throwing the punches. Jurassic World Rebirth, he said, was driving a boat and running from a tennis ball. In Predators his character dies as the picture starts. “As one of the rare former athletes in the industry, it absolutely drove me nuts,” he said. He wanted a role that sent him away to pick up a skill. Blade was supposed to be that. Latif is the one who got the blade.

The official trailer, posted by Amazon MGM Studios, makes the swap explicit in one line of dialogue: “I thought I was your sword. Now I have to fill her shoes.” Then Latif is in a clinic asking for breast milk because the baby is allergic to formula. The film keeps putting sacred duty and dirty work in the same frame, and Ali’s physical work is the hinge.

At the packed Princess of Wales Theatre after the TIFF Special Presentations world premiere, Ali said the shoot felt like “worlds were colliding all the time, every day and in every scene.” He singled out working with the children in the film, including Adia as his teenage daughter and Jahleel Kamara as his son, and called the whole experience “a bit of an emotional blur.” Adia said he gave her room on camera and off it that “made it a lot easier to approach the work, especially really tough scenes.”

After Blade Fell Apart, the Script Showed Up

Ali has been clear that the new film is not a side hustle he squeezed in around a living Marvel date. “When I look at this and Blade, I couldn’t have done both,” he said in July, “and the reason this even exists is because that project fell apart and Bassam had the time, space, energy, and focus to go and write this and then re-approach me.” He called the result “creatively redeemed” in his own accounting. The collapse did not only donate fight hours. It donated a calendar.

Tariq and Ali first met because of Blade. Tariq, whose fiction debut was Mogul Mowgli, came out of art-house work and has said the Marvel rooms taught him to watch how audiences lock onto characters, a lesson he then took into this script. He has also said he wrote the film after a near-tragedy in his own life and always pictured Ali in it. Amazon MGM and Orion announced the project in February 2025. Cameras rolled in Atlanta in March. Tariq posted that principal photography wrapped on May 29, 2025, a normal feature schedule next to a superhero file that sat open for seven years.

Once Ali said yes, the start date landed in Ramadan. He fasted and trained in Los Angeles, then they shot when the fast ended. Stunt coordinator Adam Hart had to build the fights on a short clock. “I’m so blown away with what he was able to choreograph and pull off within the time that we had,” Ali said in the Toronto Q&A. The year Marvel bought him was already in the bank. The new work still had to be invented in the gaps.

What the Year of Sword Work Bought

Ali is careful, and the distinction matters. Marvel did not finance Orion’s production. It financed a year of his preparation for a different movie, then lost exclusive use of that preparation. On a modest action shoot, that is not a sentimental footnote. It is how the lead could “get back on the bike” without a Bond-length camp.

TWO FILMS, ONE YEAR OF PREP

The gap in prep time is the part Ali keeps returning to. Blade had given him a long runway. This film gave him almost none, which is why the earlier runway still shows up on screen.

WHAT THE SHOOT DID NOT HAVE

• The budget: Ali said they did not have a Blade budget or a James Bond budget, and he is proud of what they “put up on that screen, considering our limitations.”
• The runway: He had “a fraction of the time to prep that you would have for any of those films with those big action pieces.”
• The rehearsal hall: Choreography was learned “between takes and camera setups,” after more than a year away from the Blade camp.

He still got to “let loose with a blade,” including a sequence against a crowd of attackers that he called “so fun.” In his telling, the year Marvel bought was the reason he could do that without the movie collapsing under its own action. “I feel like we knocked it out of the box.”

The Studio Chief Who Called Himself a Loser

Kevin Feige got there first. In July, on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Marvel Studios president answered a needling question about how much therapy time Blade had consumed.

I’m feeling very excited that we got Wesley back for a time in Deadpool & Wolverine and like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala.

Kevin Feige, Marvel Studios president, on the Happy Sad Confused podcast

Feige has said the reboot passed through “three or four” versions, two of them period films, before the studio settled on a modern setting and still would not shoot. He did not want to “simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires.” After Marvel’s streaming expansion, the house line became “only accept insanely great.” Blade, in his account, was not there yet, and the studio did not trust itself to raise a middling script during production. “We didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”

Ali’s July answer reads as a reply even when he does not name the podcast. The studio had the actor, the money, and the years. It did not make the movie. He took the other one. Toronto is where that choice stopped being a press-line and became a finished film with his name above a sword.

A perfect critic score out of a festival weekend is already being used, in public argument, as a scoreboard against that stall. That reading is too neat. Early festival boards often sit at 100 percent before the wider critic pool arrives, and a slice of the same conversation treats those openings as noise. The sharper fact does not need the scoreboard. Marvel paid for the training, declined the movie, and a different distributor is collecting the premiere.

Toronto Opened at 100 Percent

On the review aggregators, the film opened at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from 17 reviews, with an average of 7.6/10, and at 85 out of 100 on Metacritic from 13 critics. Those are opening samples, not a lifetime grade. They are still the first public numbers attached to a project that exists because a much louder one did not.

THE OPENING CARD IN TORONTO

• Runtime: 112 minutes, rated R in the United States.
• Critic samples: 100% from 17 reviews; Metacritic 85 from 13.
• U.S. dates: select theaters on September 25, then a wider run in October.
• Festival extra: Tariq received TIFF’s Rising Talent Award in the Tribute group around the premiere.

Reviewers in Toronto kept reaching for the same comparison Ali is tired of hearing, then setting it down. The fights are there, and they are specific because Latif will not pick up a gun. The better notices treat the action as the expression of a man who has already failed his family in quieter ways. Ali has said it is rare for an action movie to “require you to go deep, because some of it can be stunt porn,” and that he does not even file this one cleanly in the genre. He just had to be ready “at any given moment.”

Amazon MGM is sending it out as a platform release, not a comic-con detonation. Australia’s Classification Board has already classified MA 15+ in Australia, a listing dated July 7. The American rollout still has two weeks of festival talk to live on before paying audiences walk in.

Ali walked out of a seven-year contract with a year of paid sword time and a finished film Marvel will not see a dime from. Feige called himself a loser for never making Blade with him. The actor thanked the studio for picking up the training tab anyway. Both things can be true, and only one of them is playing in theaters on September 25.