It’s been two years since Marvel announced that it would be creating a film based on the exploits of Gambit, the popular card-wielding X-Men character, but the project and its lead actor are still simmering in pre-production. On Friday, fans heard for the first time that a couple of Marvel’s most successful recent films have star Channing Tatum giving the film a rethink, according to an interview with Yahoo.
When asked about the upcoming Marvel film during a press meeting for his latest film, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Tatum said that both the Logan and Deadpool films had opened some doors for the superhero project. Tatum is also signed on as a producer for the Gambit film.
“We got really lucky. We had a first draft, it was good,” he said, “But we were coming to it at a time at that creative phase of [the X-Men], where these movies went through a bit of a paradigm shift, where the X-Men movies and the superhero movies with Logan and Deadpool really broke down a lot of doors for us. We were trying to do some things that we actually weren’t allowed to do, and they just smashed down the doors, so we’re giving it a bit of a rethink.”
A Gambit film with grittier elements than previously planned will likely overjoy fans of the Cajun-accented character, who was originally a member of the comic book universe’s thieves guild before joining the good guys. The actor said the film would have R-rated elements, but he said the team isn’t looking to go for a full R-rating at this point.
“We’re not quite going there,” he said. “Because I enjoyed Gambit as a kid so I don’t want to rule out PG-13.”
While the original script came from RoboCop screenwriter Josh Zetumer, the latest iteration is reportedly being inked by past Tatum collaborator Reid Carolin, who wrote the script for Magic Mike.
With so much pre-production rethinking going on, it is apparent that even after two years of delays, the film still has a long way to go. There is still no word on when fans can expect to see the film in theaters and the Gambit film has had a tough time keeping directors signed on.
