I remember it like it was yesterday: Channing Tatum up on the Hall H stage at San Diego Comic-Con with the rest of Fox’s superhero cast. The future was so bright four years ago; Fantastic Four was still a month away from stinking up the joint, X-Men: Apocalypse…well, we had no reason to think it would suck, and nobody knew shit about any Disney/Fox deals. Well, things have changed a lot since then, including that Tatum’s Gambit movie looks less likely to happen than ever.
That said, Deadline suggests that if Gambit does happen, Tatum may just direct it himself. This would follow on the heels of numerous directors dropping out of the project; including Rupert Wyatt, Doug Liman, and Gore Verbinski. Tatum has been a producer in the past but this would be his first time behind the camera, which to me makes it seem very unlikely he’d be trusted with something of this size. Then again, Bradley Cooper has set a new bar for giving first-time directors the keys to the kingdom, hasn’t he? Tatum would stay on as the ragin’ Cajun X-Man, Remy Lebeau aka Gambit with a script by his longtime creative partner Reid Carolin.
Who knows if the movie will happen at all, though? With the Fox/Disney deal possibly wrapping up in March, the fate of the X-universe is up in the air. Gambit may not fit into Disney and Marvel Studios’ plans, or they may decide to go in a different direction with the character, a direction away from Tatum. We’ll just have to wait and see, but it’s weird that all of these Fox stories are cropping up at the time of the most uncertainty.
