Blade has arrived, though it might not be the Blade you’re expecting.
The beloved Daywalker vampire hunter officially gets his MCU debut with the new trailer for Marvel Zombies, the TV-MA-rated animated series coming to Disney+ this Sep. 24. However, despite Mahershala Ali‘s casting as the character in the franchise, this Blade isn’t voiced by the Oscar winner.
Todd Williams from All Rise and San Andreas voices the character named Blade Knight, Entertainment Weekly has learned, though the figure maintains a likeness to Ali. You can hear a snippet of Williams in the role as Blade Knight prepares for the arrival of Zombie Namor.
Todd Williams voices Blade Knight on ‘Marvel Zombies’.
Marvel Animation
Ali was originally announced as Blade at San Diego Comic-Con 2019, but the planned movie faced countless delays as various creative voices bounced on and off the project.
During a July group interview with various press around the release of The Fantastic Four: First Steps, Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige confirmed, “Mahershala is still attached,” but cited Marvel’s “over-expansion” plans for the delay on his movie.
“We didn’t want to simply just put a leather outfit on him and have him start killing vampires. It had to be unique,” Feige said at the time. “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.”
Blade Knight (Todd Williams) battles the undead on ‘Marvel Zombies’.
Marvel Animation
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At the very least, we’re getting Williams’ Blade here in Marvel Zombies, which will drop as a four-episode TV event on Disney+. Bryan Andrews and Zeb Wells created this latest offshoot, which follows the animated Eyes of Wakanda.
“After the Avengers are overtaken by a zombie plague, a desperate group of survivors discover the key to bringing an end to the super-powered undead, racing across a dystopian landscape and risking life and limb to save their world,” the official description reads.
Williams joins a voice cast roster that includes Marvel alums Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Rudd, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Tessa Thompson, Simu Liu, Awkwafina, Hailee Steinfeld, Wyatt Russell, Randall Park, Iman Vellani, and Dominique Thorne.
Watch the Marvel Zombies trailer above.