Yahoo Movies What the hell is happening to Channing Tatum's Gambit?
Poor Gambit. The X-Men's best and (completely incidentally, only) Cajun character can't catch a break.
Fox tried to make Remy LeBeau happen first in 2009 to zero success. Then they managed to bring Channing Tatum on board, but bagging the star hasn't meant smooth sailing for Gambit. Quite the opposite, really.
Let's take a look back at the whole unlucky affair.
Taylor Kitsch fails to take off
We have fond memories of Taylor Kitsch from his time on Friday Night Lights, but he hasn't had much luck in the world of movies – like the unfairly maligned John Carter, and the justifiably maligned Battleship.
And when he showed up in another universally unloved film – 2009's X-Men: Origins – his take on Gambit failed to make an impression. He wanted to come back for a solo film, but Fox wasn't interested.
Channing Tatum is a dream casting
The studio had someone else in mind. Magic Mike and Jump Street's Channing Tatum had come close to playing Gambit in 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand.
Producer Lauren Shuler Donner named him as her dream casting for the role in early 2014, and was confirmed to be playing Gambit a few months later. His solo film was officially announced in November.
In the summer of 2015, Rupert Wyatt signed on to director the film. The British filmmaker might not have a very long IMDB entry, but he followed his first well-liked film The Escapist with the critical and financial success of Rise of the Planet of the Apes. So far, so good, right?
Is Tatum still on board...?
The first sign that something wasn't right (other than the slow progress of the project and the announcement that Gambit wouldn't make an appearance in X-Men: Apocalypse) was the report that in the summer of 2015 that Tatum was on the verge of dropping out of the movie.
The report was refuted, but not until a few days had passed. We'll probably never know exactly what was going on, by the slow response to the story hinted at behind-the-scenes troubles for Gambit.
...because Wyatt certainly isn't
The next month, another piece of bad news hit. Wyatt was leaving the film, and this definitely wasn't a drill.
The split seemed amiable, with Wyatt saying that the film was clashing with his work on another project. But it was another piece of bad news for Gambit.
Doug Liman and delays
The next director to come on board was another good'un, and jumped on board two months after Wyatt left Gambit. Doug Liman's previous films included The Bourne Identity and Edge of Tomorrow, proving that he could deliver an entertaining action movie.
But the delays continued. Liman pushed back the release date (originally October 2016) by an unspecified amount to direct The Wall for Amazon.
X-Men series writer and producer Simon Kinberg promised that the film was still happening, and explained that the film was being delayed as they hunted for the right voice for Gambit so they could 'get it right' like Deadpool.
Disaster strikes again
It had been all quiet on the Gambit front for a while, but come August there was more bad news. Liman was now off the film too.
And to add insult to injury, he left Fox to work on Warner Bros' DC film Justice League Dark, although he later bowed out of that (and the film may not be happening at all any more).
Reports said that Fox was looking for a new director to begin shooting Gambit in early 2017 for release in 2018. A rumour in December 2016 had The Shawshank Redemption director and former Walking Dead showrunner Frank Darabont attached to the film, but there was no official word on that.
The little Gambit that could
Producer Lauren Shuler Donner insisted that the film wasn't dead yet, and producer Hutch Parker has promised that they still really, really want to make the movie eventually.
"It is [still part of our plans]," he told Screen Rant. "I don't have any news on that but there's still a desire and a passionate interest to see that movie made."
Liman still has faith that Kinberg will get it done.
"You know, it's a crowded field of superhero films so the challenge for Gambit or any of those other movies is finding its unique space and its unique take," he told IGN. "But, yeah, I think Simon Kinberg, who is producing it, is a great producer and he'll create something great out of it."
The Deadpool effect
Deadpool continues to loom large in the X-Men world, and in August Tatum claimed that the film was being rewritten again to incorporate the lessons learned from Ryan Reynolds's hit.
"We lit a fuse on the first one and just blew it completely out of the water. I think we got lucky – we got hit with some setbacks and it was all for a good reason," he told HeyUGuys.
"We were trying to do something completely different. We were trying to do something that this genre of movie hasn't seen before. We kept running into the same problems, and then Deadpool and Logan came through and kicked the doors down.
"Now we're really getting to do some of the things we've always wanted to do with the script – we've just sort of started over."
Fox is definitely learning from recent successes by mixing up its upcoming movies. For instance, New Mutants is being billed as 'The Breakfast Club meets The Shining'.
A new director, star and shooting date
Gore Verbinski of Pirates of the Caribbean fame reportedly joined the project as director in October 2017, and soon after that we had the news that Master of Sex's Lizzy Caplan was in talks to star in it.
On top of that, it's been reported that filming is now due to take place in February... no, hold on, make that March 2018.
Bye Gore
In January 2018, Verbinski became the third director to exit the movie, this time mere weeks before it was apparently supposed start production in New Orleans.
The exit of the director prompted the expected release date shift AGAIN to June 7, 2019, but at the Deadpool 2 premiere in May 2018, Kinberg seemed hopeful that the movie would finally start shooting in summer.
That's been and gone, of course, but Gambit apparently isn't dead yet.
A change of tone
In September 2018, Kinberg told IGN that the movie was now going to be more of a "romantic comedy" because the character is a "hustler and a womaniser".
"Deadpool was an R-rated, raunchy comedy, Logan was a western, Gambit's gonna be a romantic comedy, and New Mutants is very decidedly a horror film," he said of the extended X-Men universe. "You know, when I say romantic comedy, I use that term loosely, in the same term that I use the term western for Logan loosely."
Full steam ahead, right? Not quite. The movie then got another release date change (we've stopped counting) to March 13, 2020 as Fox shifted their calendar around.
With it came confirmation that it was somehow still in development and Tatum was still on board, but there's no director attached. Reid Carolin and Joshua Zetumer are working on the script, which Kinberg revealed still had "elements of a heist movie".
"It has elements of a romantic comedy and elements of a heist movie because he is a thief, but it is a love story between him and Bella," he told Collider.
Yes, things continue to happen and unhappen at a certainty-destroying rate, but at least we have an outline of a plan again.
And remember, we never thought Deadpool would happen either. It took more than ten years, but is now officially the most successful X-Men movie ever. If Fox hits on the right formula, Gambit could become another success. If it ever comes out...
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