Jurassic World 4: Marvel's Blade Star Mahershala Ali in Talks to Join Cast

The two-time Oscar winner most recently starred in the 2023 thriller Leave the World Behind for Netflix.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Before slaying vampires in Marvel Studios' Blade reboot, Mahershala Ali will be surviving dinosaurs in the new Jurassic World movie. 

The two-time Oscar-winning Moonlight and Green Book star is in talks to join Universal's as-yet-untitled Jurassic World 4, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Should Ali sign on, he would be the latest high-profile addition to a cast that includes Scarlett Johansson (the Avengers movies), Jonathan Bailey (Wicked), Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Lincoln Lawyer), and Rupert Friend (Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi). No details about Ali's role have been reported.

Godzilla and The Creator filmmaker Gareth Edwards is directing from a script by original Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp. Producers Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley, behind Universal's blockbuster Jurassic World trilogy that amassed a collective $4 billion at the box office between 2015 and 2022, are producing for The Kennedy/Marshall Company, with Steven Spielberg serving as executive producer via his Amblin Entertainment.

Ali has been attached to Marvel's R-rated Blade reboot since producer Kevin Feige announced the project on stage with Ali at San Diego Comic-Con back in 2019. But that movie has undergone rounds of rewrites and false starts, pushing Blade back from its original Nov. 3, 2023 release date, to Sept. 6, 2024, then Feb. 14, 2025, and finally, its current release date: Nov. 7, 2025. Production was once expected to get underway in spring 2023, but the Hollywood writers' strike took a wooden stake to those plans — leaving Ali's long-delayed Blade in limbo.

According to THR, production on the next Jurassic installment will begin mid-June in London ahead of its summer 2025 release date.

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"I was about to take a break and I started writing my next idea for a film. [Jurassic World 4] is the only movie that would make me drop everything like a stone and dive right in," Edwards said in a recent interview. "I love Jurassic Park. I think the first movie is a cinematic masterpiece... so this opportunity is like a dream to me. And to work with Frank Marshall and Universal and David Koepp, who's writing that script, I think they're all legends. So I'm just very excited."

Universal will open Jurassic World 4 in theaters on July 2, 2025.

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