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Yahya Abdul-Mateen II isn’t accusing Marvel and Disney of anything outright. But he’s not letting them off the hook, either.
The star of the recently canceled Wonder Man is raising questions about why the show got the axe — and he thinks the studio knows exactly what it looks like.
Wonder Man launched on Disney+ in January 2026 to strong reviews from critics and fans alike. It holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes and landed Abdul-Mateen an Emmy nomination for his performance. None of that mattered in the end — Marvel Studios canceled the series in July.
What makes the decision harder to swallow is the timing. Back in March, reports indicated the show had already been renewed for a second season.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, Abdul-Mateen pointed to a pattern. He brought up Mahershala Ali’s long-stalled Blade movie alongside his own show, noting that both are Marvel projects with Black leads — and both are now among the studio’s most talked-about failures.
He stopped short of calling it racism. But he didn’t dance around the perception, either.
“I think the optics are obvious. If I’m a big business, if I’m Disney, if I’m Marvel, I don’t want to be attached to these optics,” Abdul-Mateen said. “It should be a priority to change that narrative and to do what it takes to responsibly change that narrative with quality stories, with quality resources.”
He didn’t stop there.
“I felt that our show did have quality story, did have quality resources, did have quality actors and people, and did produce quality results that the viewers responded to positively, that the voters responded to positively,” he continued. “So our show does deserve some study and some real, hard information about why a show like this did not continue forward, because it had all of the ingredients that one would want in a show.”
Blade’s Decade-Long Stumble
If Wonder Man‘s cancellation stings, Marvel’s handling of Blade is on another level entirely — it’s widely considered one of the studio’s biggest missteps, period.
Ali was announced as the new Blade back in 2019, right after winning his second Academy Award. From there, things fell apart slowly. The project cycled through directors — Bassam Tariq signed on, then exited in 2022; Yann Demange came in as his replacement, then left too. Scripts were rewritten. Release dates came and went.
Eventually Blade was pulled from the schedule entirely, then quietly shelved, before Marvel officially killed it in 2025. Ali stayed attached through all of it.
In July, the two-time Oscar winner spoke candidly about the whole ordeal in an interview with GQ.
“When I look at what is for me, is it was either this or that — and I’ll take this. No offense to them. I’ve been doing this professionally for pushing 30 years now, and one thing I’ve learned is that what is for you is for you and what is not is not. For whatever reason, that project is not for me,” Ali said.
He wasn’t finished making his point clear, either.
“If they wanted to do it, we would’ve done it. So I have to move on, and I have moved on. Again, you had me under contract, they have billions of dollars, if they wanted to do the movie, we would’ve done the movie. So we’re not doing the movie.”
Marvel boss Kevin Feige, to his credit, didn’t try to spin it. Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast last week, he called himself a “loser” for never getting the film made.
“I am feeling like a gigantic loser and failure that we didn’t get off the ground with Mahershala,” Feige said. “We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique. It fell into the time when we started pulling back and saying, ‘Only accept insanely great.’ And it wasn’t ‘insanely great’ at the time. We didn’t feel like, as we often do, you can have a good script and make it a great script through production. We didn’t feel confident that we could do that on Blade, and we didn’t want to do that to Mahershala and didn’t want to do that to us.”
Ali did get one moment as Blade — a brief appearance in the post-credits scene of Eternals, talking to Kit Harington’s Dane Whitman. Fittingly enough, that’s another Marvel project widely regarded as a misfire.
Marvel and Disney haven’t responded publicly to Abdul-Mateen’s comments.
