Orion Pictures has released the first trailer for Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, and the story behind how it got made may be more compelling than the trailer itself. Mahershala Ali stars as Latif, a devoutly religious hitman whose world unravels after his wife's death, sending him on a desperate scramble across Houston to protect his kids all while his faith buckles under the weight of it.
The film reunites Ali with writer-director Bassam Tariq, the filmmaker once tapped to direct Marvel's long-gestating Blade reboot before exiting the project in 2022, a departure that Marvel and Tariq attributed to shifts in the film's production schedule. A second director, Yann Demange, later stepped in and exited as well before Blade was ultimately shelved. Arab News
This July, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige confirmed the reboot was officially dead, and Ali didn't hold back about it. Ali said if Marvel had really wanted to make the movie, "we would've done it," adding that he's since moved on. More strikingly, he tied the cancellation directly to this new film's existence: the reason "Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother" exists is because the Blade project fell apart, freeing Tariq up to write and pitch him something new, and letting Ali redirect the physical training he'd built up for Blade into this role instead.
There's real irony buried in that timeline. The original 1998 Blade, starring Wesley Snipes, is widely credited including, reportedly, by Stan Lee himself with pulling Marvel back from the brink of bankruptcy years before the MCU existed. It beat both X-Men and Spider-Man to theaters and is often cited as the film that proved Marvel properties could work on screen at all. Nearly three decades later, with Marvel now a billion-dollar franchise machine, a reboot fans had waited seven years for still couldn't get across the finish line. Reports in 2023 pointed to a shrinking budget reportedly under $100 million as the script cycled through several writers. But when Feige finally addressed the collapse publicly, he pointed to something bigger: Marvel's broader over-expansion into Disney+ content spread resources too thin to properly develop films like Blade. He's since said the failure left him feeling, in his words, like a "gigantic loser." Fortress of SolitudeComic Basics
Tariq's own filmography is sparse but distinctive. His narrative feature debut, Mogul Mowgli (2020), starring Riz Ahmed, premiered at Berlinale and won the festival's International Critics Prize; he's also known for the documentary These Birds Walk. That eye for interiority shows in this trailer, which trades typical hitman-movie bravado for something quieter and more conflicted.
Joining Ali are John Cho, Abubakr Ali, Laith Nakli, Tramell Tillman, Tiffany Boone, and Giancarlo Esposito, plus newcomers Adia and Jahleel Kamara. Given the pedigree and the fact that this film essentially exists because a Marvel movie didn't expectations are high.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother hits select theaters September 25th, expanding wide in October.